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Ultimately, the downplaying of dragons allows the displacer beast — a black, panther-like creature with menacing tails that extend from its shoulders — to steal the spotlight.

“This is not a displacer of industry,” he said Thursday.

Or she can allow the photon to continue on its journey, passing through a second beam displacer that recombines the left and right paths—the equivalent of keeping the lab door closed.

When Alice’s photon hits the displacer, its polarization is effectively measured, and it swerves either left or right, depending on the direction of the polarization it snaps into.

That her displacer should be the titled, unfocussed Blackwood—the ex-wife of the painter Lucian Freud, the estranged spouse of the composer Israel Citkowitz, and the former lover of Robert Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books—lends, for Hardwick, a “comic element” to the whole matter.