We must admit we’re not experts on Quantum Physics, or Social Physics, or any kind of physics for that matter. But we have observed plenty of odd behaviors in our family members, and we’re very intrigued by the theory proposed by Joseph Tomaras‘ “Hypothetical Foundations of a Quantum Theory of Familial Social Physics.” It’s just one of the many flappy lits in our Summer 2014 Issue, which flies out of the nest on June 20, and which you can now pre-order (in PDF form) for $3US.

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THOUGH I STARTED COLLECTING SECRETS AT THE AGE OF FIVE, it was not until my last year of graduate studies in physics that I discovered a use for my hoard.

Under another name, I am well-known within a small community, that of high-energy physics. We are the ones who send atomic nuclei smashing against each other at near light speed to see what peculiar entities escape the wreckage. Much as fiction writers do with invented families: I realized this when procrastinating on my thesis with a binge of Raymond Carver.

No offense to you writers, though, but how much more valuable would the data be if it were based on actual collisions, not your more or less stereotyped models, or your real-life examples slightly falsified to protect egos and innocents? Once the basic analogy is made, the fundamental theory almost explains itself—to those with a sufficient understanding.

For example: Every force that attracts or repels has an associated wave-particle. The force that binds quarks into protons and neutrons and binds them into an atomic nucleus is called the strong force, and its wave-particles are called gluons. Whatever we call the force that binds parents and children together into a nuclear family, its wave-particles must be what we call secrets.

This is a reasonable hypothesis supported by preliminary data. The trouble is, how can we design controlled experiments to collect the data necessary to validate the hypothesis and begin to describe this interaction? The quantum mechanics of a secret are even more challenging to measure than those of leptons. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle tells us that the precision of observed location is inversely proportional to the precision of observed momentum—the better you know where a particle is, the less you know about where it’s going. With a secret, the very act of observation negates its existence as a secret. We can call this Rosenberg’s nonexistence principle. (Of course Rosenberg is a pseudonym. My true name is on enough other, weightier theorems that the benefits of claiming this one are far fewer than the risks.)

The only out is that it is possible to observe a secret providing one becomes bound into the family that it defines and thus commits to keeping it. An experimentalist would thus need to join at least a thousand families in order to accumulate a significant dataset of secrets. By quantitatively observing the characteristics of secrets and statistically aggregating them, one could thus keep them even while observing. This is theoretically possible, though the obstacles to execution are non-trivial. Not the least of which is, the experimentalist would find it exhausting.

To formulate an experimental protocol we need to have a theoretical framework, a set of hypotheses which we will test. Analogical thinking is pre-scientific, but human beings are evolutionarily predisposed toward it, and I am no exception. Let’s continue the gluon analogy. Quantum chromodynamics describes three colors of quark, with corresponding anti-colors. Let’s assume that a secret, like a gluon, is a dynamic system that, at limited distance, always works the same no matter how you twist it around. The quark colors and anti-colors dictate eight types of gluon, linearly independent of each other—two gluons can’t add up to a third. The math is complicated—Murray Gell-Mann won a Nobel Prize for this—so you’ll just have to trust me.

Here are my assumptions: Individuals are analogous to quarks, nuclear families to hadrons, extended families to the atomic nucleus, bound together by the residual force of the secrets within the smaller family units. It would also be reasonable to assume that there are more “colors” of individuals than of quarks, but we do not yet have sufficient experimental data to venture a model, so let’s stick with six for now, and expand as necessary based on results. That would mean there are at least eight basic types of secret.

1. The In-Joke: Its humor is apparent only to those within the local confinement, i.e., the family itself. Examples could be given, but it would be pointless in a publication.
2. Mildly Embarrassing: The fact that your father always farts at least once at the family dinner table, your mother’s habit of collecting Sambo figurines and hiding them in a locked cabinet, your own comfort with picking your nose and eating it, but only when seated on the living room couch.
3. Seemingly Inexplicable: Your father’s moroseness every Father’s Day, the fact that you and your wife have a big fight every year the night before your anniversary, the collages your teenage daughter makes with the birthday cards from your in-laws and hides beneath her mattress.
4. Money: The poor always have secrets. So do the very rich. And sometimes those in the middle do, as well.
5. Race: The fact that you really don’t trust your Latino brother-in-law, but would never let on. The fact that he knows anyway, but pretends for form’s sake to like you.
6. Sexual (Non-Abusive): Need not be a direct primal scene observation, but may also be through indirect observation. Like that time you found a strap-on dildo in your parents’ bottom dresser drawer, and dare not contemplate when or how or why it was last used. Can also include past indiscretions, or unaccepted gender or orientational non-conformity (e.g. the gay uncle whom your grandmother insists on calling a “confirmed bachelor”).
7. Psychiatric: Obvious. The pills dad needs to take to get through the day, the brother who alternates between Bellevue and the Brooklyn Bridge, the aunt with an acute case of toxoplasmosis exacerbating her OCD.
8. Abuse: The kind that leaves visible marks and the kind that does not. The kind that could never be prosecuted and the kind that could be if anyone knew or cared.

With the hypothesis formulated, the onus is now on observers to provide counterexamples to the model. That, in so doing, you would risk destroying your closest relationships, ought not to serve as a deterrent to the truly scientific spirit, but a spur to investigation. You may call such a loss immeasurable, but what you call immeasurable is only that which we have not yet tried to measure.

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JOSEPH TOMARAS is locally confined to southern Maine. When not helping scientists get money to test their hypotheses, or ranting about the state of the world on his blog (skinseller.blogspot.com), he leaves traces of prose in any genre or the spaces between. He also encourages strangers to yell at him on Twitter (@epateur).