The State of the Art

Dr. Kelpie is a stallion of punctuality. Today is not a day in his favour.

The weather is terrible, he can deal with cold wind, he can shrug off icy rain, and even a rainstorm is not an obstacle to him. But it is a bit much with an icy rainstorm; it does not set a good mood for a day at the faculty.

And in addition to that he has overslept, and is running fifteen minutes late.

The auditorium he has booked is one he usually likes: old, not too big, creaky floorboards to discourage tardiness. Today that bites him in the haunch.

He enters through the vomitorium, and the floorboards betray his presence. He trots to the podium and tosses his raincoat on the desk before opening his saddlebag.

A slight murmur passes through the sixty-odd students.

Kelpie lifts a piece of chalk and with a swipe of his horn, orders it to start writing down the lecture programme in the right side of the large blackboard. He shuffles through a few notes, before picking up another piece of chalk.

The murmurs die out.

Kelpie begins writing out a lengthy field equation — a complicated Long-Rangean — with all the known quantum fields and a few fudge factors and measurement tensors. Electroweak fields, Hickory field… So far is ordinary quantum field theory. Then he adds a new term.

“If any of you have been paying a remote amount of attention somewhere in my last thirty lectures, and if you listened at all in the perquisite QFT course, this formula should only have one curious element —” Kelpie taps the new term with the chalk “— this is where it starts to get interesting; this is what the name of this course is about. Thaumically significant interaction.

“It is a property of every fundamental quanta in the standard model. Quantum objects have position, spin, electrical charge, weak charge, colour charge, hickory interaction and thaumic interaction. From the whole thing you know how to derive energy and thus at large scales gravitational interaction —” Kelpie turns to jot down the standard model: Six quarks, three electron-like leptons, three neutrinos, the two mass-less force carriers and the two weak carriers. “— so far so standard.”

The joke receives scattered laughter.

“Most of you are unicorns, which means you have very deliberate experience with magic, a few of you are pegasi and you might know a thing or two, equis, few as you are in this class, you have the definite advantage.

The students exchange strange looks.

“Most of you were not versed in quantum theory before you took this class. I am certain that the double slit and interferometer experiments came as a surprise to you and now is not the time for me to drone on about the importance of training your intuitions, as I did in lecture 19.

“I will repeat that to understand this — to use this — it is imperative that you do not make assumptions. Stick with the maths or you will find trouble in your further studies one day.”

Kelpie turns to the blackboard and adds four additional boxes. Unthaum, caloric thaum, potent thaum and harmon.

“Quantum-thaumodynamics is incomplete. The classes of quarks and leptons have six quanta, we still haven't found proof of the conjectured gravity-quantum, and there are still interactions undescribed by the four thaumic quanta. Furthermore there is still unsolved problems everywhere in the interface between what we see in the equuscopic world and what we measure in the microscopic world.

“It is still not well-explained how the Born rule works. We know that the probability of an interaction is for some reason linked to the modulus of the relative amplitude. Most physicists believe in the Many-Minds interpretation: that this probability is not an inherent quality of the universe, but that it is a consequence of how the physicist’s mind is a quantum system in and off itself. The mystery of the Born rule applies to QTD as well.

“While it is well understood that the other quantum effects almost disappear on the macroscopic level where — because energy is equal to Plank’s constant times wavelength — objects have high mass-energy and thus almost infinitesimal wavelengths, it is still not understood how the interactions of thaums actually become the magic visible on the macroscopic level.

“Some of you might be taking the excellent course in introductory thaumodynamics — lectured by my excellent colleague Dr. Pooka — and you will notice that the mandatory course in tensor algebra you had last year, really doesn't have much application in that field.

“I can also tell you that it is conjectured that interstellar magical energy is responsible for the phenomenon known as Dark Matter. Cosmological studies is however not a part of this faculty.

“What is known in thaumodynamics is that the ambient energies of magic behaves like a compressible flow under non-extreme circumstances. This is a significant statement because it allows us to make predictions, and” — Kelpie turns to the blackboard — “it gives us a property to derive. Let us get started with the properties of the two first thaumic carriers, the Untham and the Harmon…”

What follows is a classical lecture with Dr. Kelpie: so quickly from one conclusion to the next, that most of the students later have to piece together the facts from their notes, and with three pieces of chalk writing formulae in different colours and with annotations. At least his writing is near perfect.

When he finally arrives at the Navy-Strokes equation — three blackboards later — there are only a few minutes left of the allotted time and Kelpie gives out reading assignments. Another fifty-odd pages of difficult maths and qualitative analysis of experiments.

“That would be all. Until next time,” Kelpie says as he begins packing his saddlebag.

Chatter rises. A few minutes later the auditorium is empty. A few minutes later again a new class of students start arriving.