Acatalepsy: The impossibility to comprehend something fully or attain absolute knowledge.

"Sweetheart, I am home!" called Viktor as he stepped out of the Floo, and was a little surprised when he got no answer. It was absolutely pouring down with rain, so he assumed she would be somewhere indoors. He checked the living room, bedroom, kitchen, knocked on the bathroom door… and panicked. "Hermione!"

"Hello Viktor!" Hermione walked in through the glass door that opened from the living room to the garden, wearing her yellow raincoat and red wellies. She was carrying a large wicker basket full of dirty vegetables. Viktor darted and picked up his drenched girlfriend, not heeding the basket that fell on the ground, or the carrots that rolled on his living room floor, leaving a trail of mud. He wrapped one arm around her thighs and lifted her, while his other hand pushed the hoodie back so that he could bury his nose into her hair. He inhaled deeply, each breath calming him a little more.

"Viktor? What's going on? Are you quite alright?" Hermione cupped his cheeks, looking rather worried. Viktor pressed his lips to her brow, and stayed like that for a few moments before he slowly lowered her to the ground.

"Nothing, it is all fine. Everything is fine. I just missed you." He levitated the vegetables back into the basket and vanished the mess.

"Oh…" She kissed his right palm. Then she reached for the wand hidden in her sleeve and… levitated him off the ground, grinning from ear to ear.

"What is happening?" Viktor was very confused as Hermione slowly drew a circle in the air with his body.

"I wanted to show you that I missed you too, but I can't pick you up. You are very large."

Viktor crossed his arms above his chest and sulked. "That's very sweet," he grunted. "Will you put me down now?" As his feet touched the ground, Hermione put her arms in the air in anticipation of a retribution. "Truce?"

"Truce." He kissed her cheek. "Were you in the garden?"

"Yes! I am making breaded sirene with a garden salad. I went to the farmer's market today, but garden-fresh veg is still the best." Viktor smiled at the way she pronounced "sirene". She was so hopeless with Bulgarian.

"I'll change and help you." Viktor took his jacket off as headed to the bedroom.

"Viktor, what's that?" Hermione was looking at his chest with knitted brows. Of course, his gun.

"I'll lock it away immediately."

"Why are you carrying a gun? Is it because of the protection charm?"

"Just a precaution. I won't use it." Really, Viktor?

"Why carry it, if you won't use it?" Her glistening eyes were still fixed on the gun.

"Hermione…"

"Sorry, I shouldn't…" she shook her head, as if shaking away an intrusive thought. "It is ridiculous, isn't it? It is no different to killing someone with magic. It just feels so...visceral."

Viktor didn't comment further, but disappeared into the bedroom. He locked his gun away in the safe and changed into a pair of joggers and a t shirt. He had no desire to lie to his girlfriend any more than he already had, not even to soothe her.

"Can I help?"

"Sure. Do you want to bread the cheese cubes or scrub the veg?"

"I'll make the salad." Viktor emptied the vegetables into the sink. There were carrots with various grades of forking, radishes which were probably a bit too spicy this late in the year, and some rather impressive spring onions. The head of romaine lettuce was crisp and unblemished below the coarse outer leaves, unlike the rocket, which looked like it had made some caterpillars very happy. Hermione had even found some sugar-snap peas, which normally never made it to the kitchen if he got his hands on them. Viktor chopped the lettuce, onions and radishes, and was grating the carrots as Hermione dipped the cubes of grainy brine cheese into flour, egg, and breadcrumbs, making a mess.

"It would be easier if you use one hand for the dry ingredients only," said Viktor, popping the end of a carrot into his mouth.

"I am trying! I managed for the first few pieces, but then I got mixed up again," lamented his girlfriend, fingertips caked with egg and flour.

"Should I help you? I am almost done with the salad."

"You can start frying the ones that I already made." She pointed at a plate full of breaded cheese cubes, neatly stacked like a sugar cube castle. Viktor quickly shook a honey-mustard salad dressing and started to fry the cubes in olive oil. With the last cube breaded, Hermione washed her hands and moved on to slicing a large, round sourdough loaf, which looked even bigger in her tiny hands.

"You could have just bought half of the loaf, you know?"

"I know, but it looked so impressive. If it gets stale, we can always use it for toast."

"You British and your toast…"

"What? Toast is delicious, it is warm and crunchy and much more interesting than untoasted bread."

"Especially the sofa fillings that you sell in England as bread." he moved the golden brown cubes onto a paper towel-lined plate and started the second batch.

"All right, I'll admit that bread in Britain leaves a lot to be desired… at least the regular stuff that you can buy in the shops." She neatly arranged the bread slices in a basket, and tossed the salad. "I wish we could eat outside… It was so nice earlier, and then it turned all of a sudden."

"That is summer at the Black Sea."

They set the small dining table in the living room. As they ate in comfortable silence for a while, sipping a fruity red wine between mouthfuls of salty cheese and crisp salad, Viktor mused about how much he loved this, this companionship, moving effortlessly around each other in harmony, cooking and cleaning together, easy conversations, silly jokes, just being oneself and being loved for it. Knowing her body and exactly how to please it. He remembered falling in love with her, and it had been wonderful, all soft knees and sweaty palms and heart palpitations. This, however, was not a mere feeling. It was effort, discipline, concentration, hope, faith, it was leaving egotism behind. It was anticipating the flower from the bud, the dawn from the night. After all these years with Hermione, Viktor was sure that everything he knew, he knew, because he loved.

"Away with the fairies, Viktor?"

"What?"

"Are you daydreaming?"

"I was thinking."

"Penny for them?"

"What?"

"Your thoughts. What were you thinking?" English idioms were just weird.

"What is magic?"

Hermione raised an eyebrow. It seemed like he was the only one who couldn't. "Do you really want to do this now?"

"Why not?"

Viktor watched as she slowly chewed a piece of bread. "I got a letter from Durmstrang today. Headmaster Inan invites me to a debate. Moldiyar Yergebekov will introduce his new book. I, for the life of me, can't comprehend why he or anyone else would give him the time of day."

"How so?" Viktor washed the last bit of his salad down with a sip of water.

"Because Yergebekov is a fool. He talks and writes books about quantum physics for the wizarding society, although he knows shit about it. He has no degree in any natural sciences, no idea about maths, he is just talking and philosophizing. Quantum mechanics is explained by mathematical predictions and experimental evidence, which require knowledge. You can't just talk about these things if you don't understand the science behind it."

"I see, so he is a charlatan."

"I didn't say that. Not quite, at least. Well, yeah, he kind of is. You should not talk about stuff if you don't know what you are talking about. Write what you know - it's as easy as that. The biggest problem is, hardly anyone in the wizarding world knows better, so they believe him. There is a handful of us who have been publishing in the field, but scientific publications are not as accessible as his easily digestible nonsense books."

"So, will you go?"

"I am not sure. I don't know who else is invited. What if it is me against a bunch of old white wizards?"

"Then you teach them that the future of magic is in the hands of young, clever witches."

"That's not what I meant… I have no problem talking to people in my field about my research, but when it comes to the layman, I… it's difficult. I wish I were better at communicating these things."

"You are an excellent teacher, sweetheart. There is a whole generation of students that can confirm that."

"That is different, though. When I am, I was in Hogwarts," she paused for a second after the painful slip of the tongue. "You see, learning is not difficult if it is incremental. With children, you develop a fundament, little by little, and if the fundament is good, you can build up on it until they are quite proficient at what they are doing. In this case, however, I have to explain rather complex concepts which can only be properly expressed using mathematics, to people who have little to no background on the topic, in a very short time. I am not the most patient person in the world, and most people suck at listening."

"I see…" Viktor sent the empty plates to the kitchen and guided his girlfriend to the sofa. "You can practice on me, I am a good listener."

"I tried before…"

"Did you really try?" She had indeed tried to explain to him a couple of times before, but started at a way too high level and got frustrated quickly when he couldn't follow.

"OK… then let's try something else. Tell me what you know. About physics."

Viktor stopped to think. He had taken physics courses at Durmstrang, which had been especially interesting to him due to their relevance to Quidditch. "I know, for example, that the acceleration of an object equals to the force applied to it divided by its mass."

"Excellent! That is Newton's second law. This actually is a fantastic starting point. It means that if you know the initial position of an object, its mass, and its velocity, you can very accurately predict its trajectory and final position. So, to simplify it, there is something, you know its initial state, and you can use an equation to predict what it will do in the future. What else? What about atoms?"

Viktor knew about atoms. He summoned a block and transfigured a few its and bits that lay around the desk into coloured crayons. He drew two each of green and red balls in a cluster. The two red balls would be protons, which he marked with a (+). The two green balls were neutrons, which he marked with a (o). He then drew a circular orbit around the cluster, and two more balls on this orbit with a yellow pencil. These were electrons, which he marked with a (-). He then stretched his arm out and proudly displayed his creation to his girlfriend.

"Fantastic! This is a helium atom." Which was a coincidence, Viktor had just decided to draw two of each ball without too much consideration. "Except, that it doesn't look like this. Maybe more like this." She wet her thumb and smudged the circle and the yellow ball.

"See, particles, small things, they don't behave according to the laws of classical physics. For particles, we can only calculate the probability of them being at a certain location, rather than their exact location. We can also measure their location, but then we have to forfeit measuring other properties, like their speed."

"Why?"

"Because particles are also waves."

Viktor blinked a few times. "So, the electron is not a ball, but a wave?"

"Yes, same for the protons and neutrons too, but these are made of even smaller particles called quarks."

"And they are also waves."

"Yes. And particles."

"Waves like when you touch the surface of the water?"

"Well, they don't actually wave anything, but essentially yes... kind of. This is also why you can not determine their position and frequency at the same time. The frequency is the distance between the crests of a wave. But in order to talk about the position of a wave, you need a wave pulse, which has no frequency." Hermione drew a wave with crests and troughs, drew a line between two crests, which she marked "f". Below this, she drew a straight line with a single scribble in the middle, which Viktor imagined was a wave pulse. It made sense. One could not talk about the "location" of an entire wave. But wait…

"You said the electron is also a particle."

"Yes."

"So, it is like the ball."

"Yes...no. It behaves like a particle and a wave." She was quiet for a while, pondering. "Think of a ball, which rolls. And then think of a cube, which doesn't roll. And then think of a cylinder. It rolls on one side, but not on the other. Still, it is neither a cube nor a ball."

Viktor thought he understood, but he also acknowledged that the fact that he thought he understood probably meant that he didn't.

"The probability amplitude of a quantum system is described by its wave function." Viktor recognized the Greek capital letter "psi" that Hermione drew on the page, but that was about as much as what he got from this sentence. "Too complex? Remember a=F/m? If we know the initial state, of an object, such as its position and velocity, we can calculate how it will behave in the future. In case of a particle, if you know its quantum state, it's wave function, we can feed it into an equation called Schrödinger equation, and get a probability distribution of what it will be doing in the future. However, it is still a probability, we don't know for sure till we measure."

"What is a quantum state?" This was more than a tad confusing. Hermione squinted, tapping her head with the pencil.

"OK. Let's see… Do you know what momentum is?" Viktor did.

"Each elementary particle has an intrinsic momentum, called the spin. The particles with whole integer spins are called bosons, and those with half integer spins are called fermions. An electron has a spin of ½, so it is a fermion. Each electron can have two spin states, spin up and spin down. Basically, either aligned with the direction of your measurement, or the opposite."

"What if you measure horizontally? Not up or down?"

"Ah, you clever sausage. You know, you would have made a fantastic scientist."

"No, I wouldn't." Viktor had been a good student, but he was not, nor would he ever be, an academic.

"You ask the right questions. That is extremely important. Now, listen carefully. In that case, with 50% probability the electron would be spin up, and 50% spin down. Because, until you measure it, the spin of the electron isn't up or down. It exists as a superposition of both states. Quantum state is a probability distribution of each possible outcome of a measurement, like the spin measurement."

This was indeed a little difficult to digest. Existing as a superposition of possible outcomes? Then again, these particles were very small, so perhaps it was expected that laws of physics were different for them.

"But this 'quantum state' is no longer a probability then, if you measure. You will know if the electron is up or down?"

"Exactly. This is called the collapse of the wave function. When a quantum system interacts with the environment, the superposition is reduced to a single, random state."

"So a quantum system is a particle-wave, and it exists as two states at the same time."

"True. Schrödinger, one of the godfathers of quantum physics, proposed a thought experiment to demonstrate this. Schrödinger's cat." Hermione drew a square on a new sheet of paper and a stick figure of a cat. Just in time, the small orange furball walked into the living room from wherever she had been, jumped on Viktor's lap, and started kneading his thighs with her tiny, sharp nails. He tried hard not to wince. It wouldn't do to start screaming like a little child because of one small cat. Fuck this was painful.

"Awwww, isn't she the cutest thing in the world? And she loves you, look."

"Yes, very cute, loves me very much." Viktor stroked the cat between the ears with his pinky, his other fingers being too big for her. "What about Schrödinger's cat?"

"Well, she wasn't so lucky. Schrödinger proposed the following experiment. The cat is in a box, together with a radioactive atom, which exists in a superposition of decayed and not-decayed states, and has a fifty percent chance of decaying within a certain time. If the atom decays, a radioactivity detector in the box triggers a system that releases cyanide gas. If it doesn't, the cat remains alive."

"I see. This is the experiment?"

"Well, yes. As I said, the radioactive atom exists in a superposition of the decayed and not decayed states. Which means that, until we open the box and "observe", the cat also exists in a superposed state of alive and dead. The cat and the radioactive atom are "entangled". When we observe, the wave function collapses. What was before a probability, becomes a defined measurement."

"What does entangled mean?" Not that Viktor thought he would be any closer to understanding if he knew what it meant, but he tried anyway.

"Uf, this is a little harder to explain. Remember the electrons? Spin up and down? If we would, for example, create an electron pair out of energy, both would be in a superposition of spin up and down. But, if we measure the spin of one, the wave function for the other one will also collapse, and its spin will be in the opposite direction. And it doesn't matter if they are in each other's vicinity or light years away."

"Do they communicate with each other?"

"In a way, yes. It is more like they don't have separate wave functions any more, but a single one. So when we make the observation, the whole wave function collapses."

Viktor took a moment to think.

"It makes no sense to me that particles that are not being observed and those being observed behave differently. You will have to explain that again."

"Well, there are more physicists who think that way, too. Now, let's imagine something else. You observe the cat, alive or dead. Which means that you also become entangled with the radioactive atom and the cat. All in all, we are also made of quantum particles. There is no definite number of molecules where quantum physics stops being applicable. So you see the cat alive, and dead."

Viktor was a little frustrated at that point. "There is no such thing as an alive and dead cat, Hermione. Are you sure this is a good example?"

"It is. What if I told you that, rather than the wave function collapsing, the alive cat and the dead cat inhabit separate worlds? Therefore, that the you that observes the alive cat and the you that observes the dead cat also inhabit separate worlds?"

"I would say this is crazy."

"Well, except that it isn't really. Mathematically, it means that the wave function will not collapse. It means that the universe is composed of many branches in which all these possible outcomes are played out."

"So, if there is radioactivity, another branch of the universe forms. In one of them, there is me who sees the cat alive, and in the other, there is another me who sees the cat dead."

"Yes, but there is a version of you who sees the cat alive and another version who sees the cat dead, and these are not the same person. Now, not all outcomes are possible, of course. There will not be a world in which the radioisotope decayed, but the cat stayed alive. An electron will never turn into a proton. The probability of each outcome is still that, a probability. Some outcomes will be likelier than the others. This interpretation of quantum mechanics is called "the many worlds" theorem, but nobody knows how many is many. So there is a chance, albeit small, that every possible scenario will play out."

Viktor leaned back into the cushions and closed his eyes. It was all too theoretical, too hard to imagine. He did understand some things, and what he heard did seem to make sense, but he sensed that he lacked the necessary background to assess these theories critically. There was, however, one thing he didn't get at all.

"This is all fascinating. You did a very good job explaining it. I know it is probably a very simplified version. I still don't get it, what does this have to do with magic?"

Hermione leaned back too, and laid her hands on her lap. "Look, this is still a work-in-progress, OK? So we need to approach this carefully." She took a deep breath. "When we live, we live as one version of ourselves. We have no chance of observing what happens in another of these "worlds". At least, non-magical people have no chance. Witches and wizards on the other hand… maybe we do. Maybe, this is exactly what we are doing when we perform magic. We are observing a possibility that has played out in another universe. We have the ability to bring that world into this."

Viktor grimaced and felt goosebumps rise on his skin. "So you say that when I do this," he wandlessly transfigured a piece of scrap paper into a daisy, "I am merely observing a world where this piece of paper is a daisy."

"Something like that. Look, I know, it sounds crazy, but it is also hard to express with words. It's a bit like dancing about photography. And I know, we have no experimental verification yet, but, there are many other things we cannot experimentally verify yet, the mathematics behind them are sound, and we are merely lacking the technology. The Higgs boson, for example. Nobody has seen this particle before, but the mathematical proof is so solid that it is already included in the standard model. We just need the technology to see it."

"What do you think gives witches and wizards this ability?"

"I don't know… I mean, I have a theory, but to test it we would need to make a large scale comparative study between magical and non-magical people. Even better," she raised her head, looking into his eyes with a burning intensity, "magical people who have lost the ability to perform magic."

"Do you want to conduct experiments on the victims?" Viktor all of a sudden felt very uncomfortable, and another wave of goosebumps prickled his skin. He shooed the cat away and turned to his girlfriend.

"Not me, I mean, I would love to be involved in such a study, but I am more a theoretician. It makes sense, though, doesn't it? If a biochemist wants to find out which gene is responsible for a certain trait, she will find an individual which lacks this trait and compare their genomes. If we want to find out what determines the ability to perform magic, we compare magical and non-magical people. Imagine how important this is, Viktor. We finally have the chance to solve one of the biggest mysteries of the magical world. We have the chance to turn this tragedy into a discovery."

"Is it really a good idea? There are already enough supremacists out there. For now, we can tell them that all humans, wizards and non-wizards, are physically equal. What if we find out that there is indeed something physical, measurable, that gives wizards and witches this special ability? Even confirmed by muggle science?"

"But it wouldn't mean that we are superior! We are just different. Any time you make a scientific discovery, there can be people who want to abuse that discovery for their own purposes. If we thought like this, we would not be able to do any science at all. In any case, there are many kinds of racism in the world, and none of them have an ounce of plausible explanation to them. People will keep making up ways to segregate societies. If anything, science helps us prove that racism is bullshit."

Viktor was not convinced. "Why do we have to know? It is not like our magic is any worse if we don't know its source. Or maybe it is, and it is a good thing. What if such a discovery makes things possible that we can't do now? Like mass destruction?"

"Because!" Hermione was flushed, trembling, like she was when she passionately defended something. "Because it is science. It is knowledge. And knowledge is… possibility. It gives us a choice. It is like your wand -you can use it to heal a wound, but you can also use it to kill someone. Does this mean we should stop practising magic altogether?"

"No." Viktor took her hand. They sat there for a few moments in silence, immersed in thoughts. He had finally realized how easy it was to oppose innovation that one did not fully understand. He had considered himself open and adaptable, but open to what? The newest trail running shoes? Carbon fibre racing bikes? Camera phones? Those were indeed very convenient and easy to accept, but the moment he was confronted with an idea that clashed with his world view, he had opposed it immediately without even trying to understand it properly. Wasn't that what people like the Identitarians did, outright reject non-wizarding innovation without taking the time to comprehend its nature and limits? He was not as conservative as them, but apparently not free of prejudice, either. He gazed at the soft, little hand in his own palm. The hand that belonged to the soft, little witch who defended her opinions like a Chinese Fireball defended her cubs. The small witch, who was not born to the wizarding world, was perhaps going to be the one to unearth its greatest secret. His heart filled with pride.

"What I explained to you just now are… theories. Mathematical representations. It will take years, decades, and work of many scientists and preferably a trillion-dollar particle accelerator to figure out how they apply to the everyday charms and transfigurations that we use. Most probably, we never will. We are just at the beginning, and even that beginning is very overwhelming," Hermione put her head on his shoulder, the cloud of her hair tickling his ear.

"Even a journey of a thousand kilometres begins with one step." With one hand, he gathered the pile of hair into a messy bun, lightly glueing the locks together with a silent sticking charm. "I am observing a world in which Hermione's hair holds together," he thought, chuckling inwardly. Once the case in his hands was solved, he would need to take some more time to understand her work, at least as well as he could.

"You know, when scientists do research, they don't try to cause a paradigm shift, or change the world or save humanity or anything. We are merely curious, and we would like to answer a question that bothers us. Then, the answer leads to another question, and then another. As you said, it is a road that you have to take one step at a time. Viktor?"

"Hermione?"

"Why did you ask me about magic? I mean, why now?"

"When I talked to Lucius Malfoy in Hogwarts, he told me that Draco's potions company was looking for a cure for the victims, and they were very close to succeeding. I have been thinking since then, how can they look for a cure, if no one even knows what happened to the victims? Or, how do you remove the ability to perform magic, if you don't know what to target?"

Hermione lifted her head and shook the restraining charm off of her hair in annoyance. "Excellent thinking again, but I am afraid science is not always as precisely planned out and ingenious as you think. Often, especially in the pharmaceutical industry, discoveries are made by screening numerous compounds in high-throughput systems. Sometimes, discoveries are just made by accident. In any case, I am afraid I have wasted your time with my lengthy explanations. It is not possible that somebody took my equations and turned them into a vile weapon -most likely that someone was trying to develop something else, and accidentally produced a potent poison."

"Do you think it is a chemical? Maybe a potion?" Hermione nodded. "If he was casting a spell, surely someone would have noticed it? I mean, I don't know, of course, I only know what you and Harry told me. When I heard about what happened, however, my first instinct was some sort of gas or aerosol. So yes, a poison." Viktor made a mental note to re-examine the victim memories, maybe even reinterview some of them.

"About Draco, I am not sure. He hasn't been on speaking terms with his father since the war."

"So it is not gossip?"

"No, it is not gossip, you can even look it up in the encyclopedia. Lucius Malfoy must have heard about his supposed success from Mrs Malfoy or Severus, or some other acquaintance. It is probably just a lie."

"You think?"

"Draco was always like that. Braggart. Pretending to be better than he is. There is no way in hell he can develop a cure for an unknown syndrome in ten days. I will only believe it when I see it."

Yawning, Viktor noticed that it was almost eleven. "Shall we go to bed?"

"Yeah…" Hermione moved to his lap. For a minute, maybe two, they embraced each other, breaths and heartbeats intermingling. "Let's go to bed," she murmured in his ear. "Tomorrow is another day."

A/N: Ok... now, I am posting this chapter a little skittishly, I have to admit. It is my favourite, has taken me weeks of research, several rewrites and many more. We will go back to the main plot next week.

As compelled as I am to do so, I will not include a bibliography and further reading list here :D Nevertheless, if you have questions, let me know below. Needless to say, a HP fanfic is not the best place to learn about quantum physics, but I hope that my take on HP magic has at least got you interested. Sorry if it was a bit confusing, as Hermione said, it is hard to talk about this stuff.

Viktor's inner monologue was inspired from this quote from War and Peace:

"Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source."

If you have any questions, or have any feedback, I am happy to receive them! This story has no reviews on FFN, and I sometimes wonder if anyone is reading it at all...