The Uncertainty Principle

The white board was filled with equations, graphs and language that the ordinary layperson would have had no clue as to the function or meaning. The students in Professor Howard Tappan’s Quantum Physics seminar largely had no understanding of them either. At least according to Professor Tappan.

He’d been at Cornell for the better part of two decades. Published widely, an expert in his field, respected for his studies in the field, Professor Tappan was generally detested by anyone who knew him on a personal level. His demanding standards left little room for compromise or compassion. One understood the material or one did not. If one understood, that student received affirmation by the absence of ridicule. Those that did not understand, meaning the majority, received little but ridicule.

“Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle,” Tappan scrawled across the board, his penmanship reflecting his mood. Impatient and angry. He underlined it and spun dramatically scanning the class, pointing at his victim in the second row. “You.”

“Me?” the student asked, looking nervously side-to-side, the students on either side slumping in their seats, hiding to avoid becoming collateral damage.

“Your name,” Tappan demanded.

“Brian,” the student said.

“I don’t care about your first name. I’m not looking for a new friend. We are not getting beers after class. What is your last name?”

“Wilhite,” the student said but in a manner that sounded more like a question than an answer.

“You’re not sure?” Tappan said. “Is this the Wilhite Uncertainty Principle? The failure to be confident in even knowing one’s own last name.”

The rest of the class laughed, uncomfortably. Muffled, withering under the glare of Professor Tappan. 

“Who can help Mr. Wilhite? If that really is his name,” Tappan said, arching an eyebrow and firing a laser glare at Wilhite who sank as far into his seat as he could without cowering on the floor beneath it.

A young woman in the back row raised her hand. 

“Go on,” Tappan said, acknowledging her with a wave of the marker.

“The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that there is a limit to the precision of determining both a particle’s position and momentum. The more accurately one is measured, the less accurate the other can be known,” she said, confidently, looking above the rest of the class, chin held just high enough to reflect the superiority she felt in the moment.

Tappan scrawled the equation on the board: ΔpΔq ≈ h. “With h being obviously…” he left it hang there, back still to the class, waiting.

“Planck’s Constant,” the young woman said after a pause, one or two other students mumbling along, as well.

Tappan hung his head. He was counting to ten. His wife’s advice. His ex-wife. It wasn’t advice he took often which resulted in the “ex-“. 

He turned and glared at the class. He said nothing for seconds. To the class the time seemed interminable.

“Every single one of you should have answered that in unison,” he said calmly. His calmness was somehow more terrifying than his rage. He pointed at the h on the board. “That is the most basic knowledge for this course. Every single one of you know, or should know, h represents Planck’s Constant. This is not a physics survey course. This is not ‘Physics for Dummies’ though I’m beginning to think it might deserve that title after your weak responses. This is all so basic.”

Tappan went to his tattered briefcase, the worn leather a throw back, reminiscent of the standard of professors from a much earlier era. He produced from it a stack of research papers and shook them at the students.

“Yet somehow,” he said, trying to keep a handle on his anger, though his ears were beginning to turn red, the first signs he was soon going to lose his composure. “Somehow all your papers go into great detail and show a great understanding of the most advanced theorems. How is that, pray tell?”

He waited. The students eyes remained averted. The floor, laptop screens, out the windows. Anywhere but towards the professor.

“Well,” one finally chanced. It was Wilhite. “You’re sort of intimidating in class. It’s easier for some of us to think outside of here.”

“Aw,” Tappan said, accompanying puppy dog eyes and pouting bottom lip to emphasize the point. He switched to baby talk to drive a dagger through the point. “Is him’s needing his safe space?”

The class stirred. “I don’t think that’s a fair characterization, professor,” the young woman from the back row said, not quite as confidently as she had asserted the definition of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle just moments before.

“Miss Johnson doesn’t think I’m being fair,” Tappan said, Claudette Johnson more startled that the professor knew her name than recognizing she was about to come under attack. “You know what I find, in your words, unfair? I find it unfair that I’m forced to read through paper after paper that is either directly plagiarized from other sources, downloaded off the internet, or clearly written with the help of AI.”

The class stirred more, some grumbling, some growing angry, insulted. Many more worried.

“Where is Mister Gray?” Tappan said, scanning the room. No one volunteered. “Andrew Gray?” Still no answer.

Tappan went to his notebook spread open across the lectern and ran his finger down the printed class list. Written next to each, in his own hand, was a two-to-three word descriptor. Dirty Ballcap, Daddy’s Credit Card. Vegetable Lasagna. And next to Andrew Gray, Mouth Breather.

He found him easily in the second row, mouth hanging open as it did through every minute of every class.

“Did you, like Wilhite here,” Tappan said, waving at Wilhite again, Wilhite beginning to feel like a human piñata, “Did you forget your name. Or were you just too petrified to answer.”

Gray said nothing. He was clearly too petrified to answer.

“Mr. Gray, where did you source your research paper for the Schrödinger Equation?” Tappan said, standing directly in front of him now, oblivious to the discomfort of the student between them in the first row who had nowhere to look but directly at Tappan’s fly.

Gray still said nothing. Tappan waited. A staring match. Tappan won. The outcome was never in doubt. Gray just hung his head.

“Yes, I would think it would be extraordinarily easy to recall considering you copied it directly from Wikipedia,” Tappan stepped away, waving the paper dramatically over his head. “Word-for-word. You didn’t change so much as a comma.”

The rest of the class squirmed uncomfortably. It was like being at an exectuion, waiting for the guillotine to drop. Some felt bad for Gray. Most just were glad they weren’t him.

Tappan’s voice grew calm again. “You didn’t even cite Wikipedia as your source.”It sent ice down everyone’s spine. He looked at Gray and calmly, quietly dismissed him. “Gather your belongings and go, Mr. Gray.”

Gray looked nervously about the class, humiliated. It took a moment, but he finally started moving, shoving his laptop into his bag and pulling his baseball hat over his eyes, he stumbled past the student next to him and hurried out the door, frozen there by one parting shot from Tappan.

“Be glad I’m only failing you, Mr. Gray. Plagiarism is an expellable violation.”

Gray didn’t turn around. He stayed in the door a moment longer, then quietly turned the knob and vanished outside.

“Was that really necessary, professor?” Claudette Johnson asked. Her voice quivered just slightly but was otherwise strong. “Did you have to humiliate him in front of all of us? Couldn’t you have done that in the privacy of your own office?”

“Very good. You’re finding your voice, Miss Johnson. Perhaps you’ll eventually be bold enough to come join the discussion in one of the lower rows rather than cowering in the rear.” She was still surprised he knew her name. “But to your point, what good would that have done?”

“He wouldn’t have been humiliated in front of all of us,” she said.

“He would have been humiliated regardless,” Tappan said, turning his back to the class, returning to the white board. “And all of you would have been deprived of a wonderful learning moment.”

On the board he wrote “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

“Who is familiar with this?” he said, looking out at the class. He could tell some of them were from their expressions, how they rose up from their seats. Still no one answered.

“It is my favorite play,” Tappan said. 

“I thought it was a movie,” Wilhite said without realizing he was talking, then freezing and sinking back in his seat.

“It was a play first, by the great David Mamet,” Tappan said. “But then, as Wilhite correctly pointed out, it was later a movie. Congratulations, Wilhite, you got something right today, and in the process have proven the blind squirrel theory.”

Wilhite was just relieved to have been correct about something. He didn’t care about the insult. He didn’t actually even pick up on it.

“My favorite scene is near the beginning, when a bunch of underachievers find out what it is to be motivated. Sound familiar?” Tappan asked, looking around the room. The expressions ran from puzzled to terrified. “You have one week to re-write this tripe,” he said flinging the papers into the air, the sheets raining down in a flurry of rustling pages and gasps from the students.

“The best paper will receive an A,” he said, enunciating each word to punctuate his point. “The second best paper will receive a B. The third a C, fourth a D. The rest of you fail!”

The students were shocked, wide-eyed looks exchanged around the classroom. Even for Tappan this was outrageous. Some withdrew, some protested, most mumbled and swore loud enough for only themselves to hear it.

“And because so many of you seem to find AI so beguiling in your paper writing, I’ve enlisted the help of my graduate assistant to create an algorithm that will allow your papers to be graded by AI. 

“This isn’t fair,” Claudette Johnson protested.

“Life isn’t fair, Miss Johnson,” Tappan said. “At least you all will learn that.”

Back in his office at the end of the day, a knock came at Tappan’s door.

“Enter,” he said, looking up from his notes that he still wrote in long hand, no word processing for him.

Andrew Gray slipped into the room and closed the door behind him.

“Did anyone see you?” Tappan asked.

“No, I made sure,” Gray said.

Tappan reached into his desk drawer and drew out an envelope. He handed it over to Gray, who opened it and thumbed through the contents.

“Fifty dollars,” Gray said.

“As agreed,” Tappan said. “Tell Blanning I said you did well. He should cast you in more mainstage productions.”

“He just cast me in Of Mice and Men,” Gray said.

“Let me guess,” Tappan said, squinting, then pointing at Gray. “Lenny.”

“George,” Gray said. “Don’t want to get typecast as the mouth breather.”

“Tell Blanning to set aside a ticket for me for opening night.”

“Will do. Thanks, professor,” Gray said, pausing in the door. “I stuck around outside and listened.”

“And?”

“Pretty convincing,” Gray said. “But you aren’t really going to fail everyone except the top four.”

Tappan smiled. It was his first genuine smile of the day. “Of course not. But they don’t know that.”