Can we ever justify murder? Every death leaves at least someone, or something, that will miss them. Even if it is just their dog or cat. Or the cockroaches that zoom around their empty pizza boxes. Then there are all the chains of connection where others benefit from a person’s existence, like the detectives that earn a livelihood from putting criminals away. There is also supposedly always good in a person, no matter how bad they appear from the outside. There is always a chance they will find God and reform.

There’s also bad in everyone. Chances are the first person that comes to your mind isn’t Microsoft founder, multi-billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates. Yet goody-goody Bill was arrested in 1975 for driving without a license and again a few years later for reckless driving that could have killed someone.

How can we justify murdering someone? I’m going to tell you about a certain period in my life and let you be the judge.

I was in my early thirties and a rising star at the Stanford’s Linear Accelerator (SLAC) in Menlo Park California. I had more than thirty papers to my name, mostly based on Einstein’s nifty equation e=mc². You’ve probably heard of this equation. It’s the best-known equation in the world. It’s on T-shirts. It links energy e to mass m and explains the huge amount of energy radiating from the sun as well as the devastating power of thermonuclear weapons.

What is less well-known, is that the underlying physics also allows for the reverse process, namely for Energy to be converted into Matter. This reverse process is a lot harder, however, due to the pesky denominator c² in the m=e/c² version of Einstein’s equation. This is the speed of light squared, a huge number that undermines and swamps your every effort to create matter from pure energy. It’s like trying to light a match at the bottom of a swimming pool or in gale force winds. You have to pour an extraordinary amount of energy into the tiniest amount of space to create even a pinhead of matter.

We direct thousands of laser beams towards a central chamber, the red and green beams coming from all directions so that the whole experiment looks like a giant Christmas pincushion.

My idea was to add to the laser beam experiment the phenomenon called quantum superposition, a weird yet proven consequence of quantum mechanics.  Arranged correctly, instead of a few hundred laser beams, there would be literally billions of red and green beams pouring their energy into a single chamber. People ask where all the energy would come from – wouldn’t the superposition experiment bring the entire Californian power grid to its knees? The answer is that no, the laser beams would be drawing energy from outside our universe, tapping into the quantum world of infinity that is normally outside of our perception and yet all around us – just as if you shake and shake a bottle of soft drink and then crack open the lid and all the pent-up bubbles spew out.

The problem was that the billions of laser beams lasted for a very brief time – less than a nanosecond – before decohering and collapsing back into the real world. I needed the quantum superposition to last at least 5000 times longer to have any chance of creating matter. This issue occupied my mind every minute of every day. It was driving me crazy.

They say that you should take to the mountains when you are wrestling with a particularly hard problem.  I went hiking through Yosemite with my girlfriend Bec with the dark hair, jingling bracelets and long tanned legs. It was early in the tourist season and we had the snow-covered trails to ourselves, keeping an eye out for black bears while rejoicing in the glittering waterfalls spilling meltwater onto the valley floor below. It all started with a question from Bec.

“What’s all this about Schrodinger’s cat?” she asked as we paused to catch our breath at the top of the Vernal Falls.

“You’ve been reading the book I gave you,” I said.

“There’s a whole chapter on this damn cat and I still don’t understand it,” she said

“Hahaha, you’re like Stephen Hawking who wanted to take out a gun and shoot it,” I said, grinning.

“It’s a thought experiment where a cat that is completely cutoff from the rest of the world is neither dead nor alive until you open the box to look at it,” I continued.

I was about to describe Schrodinger’s thought experiment in more detail when the solution to my own problem dropped into my mind. I suddenly knew with total clarity what was needed.

I already knew that the system had to be physically isolated to prevent the ever-present threat of decoherence. But what was missing, is that it also had to be isolated from my consciousness. It was my own sentience that had been ruining the experiment, causing it to decohere in a fraction of a second.

I hugged Bec until she couldn’t breathe and whirled her around in the snow on that Yosemite pass above the Vernal Falls. It was two days prior to my thirty third birthday.

Five weeks later and all the preparation had been done. I was wearing an electrode-laden skullcap hooked up to a computer. I was given a general anesthetic by my doctor friend Walter from Stanford’s School of Medicine. The computer waited until it detected my brainwaves settling into quiescence and only then kicked off the energy-into-matter experiment. A few billion lasers poured their combined energy into the middle of the lab. Four minutes later my computer commanded the experiment to end and the multiverse of lasers shut down.

I slowly came out of anesthesia. As soon as Walter pronounced me fully recovered, I summoned my trusty lab assistant Sten and we hastened down to the lab. Sten, short and muscular, rolled along ahead of me to unlock the first security door. Then the second. He started back in surprise, almost knocking me over, uttering expletives in his native Ukrainian. I was both in front and behind him. There was two of me.

Nature abhors a vacuum. In a bizarre and unexpected twist of irony, the energy-into-matter quantum superposition had “noticed” my absence during the four minute experiment and created a new me from the multiverse using the gargantuan google-watts of energy available from billions of laser beams. Matter had been created from Energy just like Einstein’s equation said it would, m=e/c² .

Initially excited, over time I grew to loath the “other me”. The media hounded us for interviews. People in the street pestered us. He insisted on dressing the same as me and accompanying me to the same hairdresser. He never left my side. My colleagues, friend and family could not distinguish between us.  My physics papers now had his name on them as well as mine. There was still only one Bec, I’ll leave you to imagine what that was like. The whole situation was untenable.

A year later and I was back at Yosemite, having hiked to the top of Half Dome. Bec was lagging behind us, still out of sight, and there was no-one else around. A quick shove and he was gone. It was that easy.

There was a coronial enquiry of course, and the police interviewed me a number of times. The cops may have had their suspicions and the media was definitely out to get me, but the public prosecutor was not convinced that a jury would convict when (a) there was no actual proof, and (b) the supposed victim originated from somewhere in the quantum foam of the multiverse rather than being of earthly origins like rest of us.

Every death leaves at least someone, or something, that will miss them. But not in this case. Except Bec. She’ll get over it. We had a call in the middle of the night last week. She’s busy choosing her outfit for the Nobel awards ceremony this December.