Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything
George Musser
Language: English
Pages: 258
ISBN: 2:00314824
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A mind-bending voyage to the frontier of modern physics
What is space? It isn't a question that most of us normally stop to ask. Space is the venue of physics; it's where things exist, where they move and take shape. Yet over the past few decades, physicists have discovered a phenomenon that operates outside the confines of space and time. The phenomenon—the ability of one particle to affect another instantly across the vastness of space—appears to be almost magical. Einstein grappled with this oddity and couldn't quite resolve it, describing it as "spooky action at a distance." But this strange occurrence has direct connections to black holes, particle collisions, and even the workings of gravity. If space isn't what we thought it was, then what is it?
In Spooky Action at a Distance, George Musser sets out to answer that question, offering a provocative exploration of nonlocality and a celebration of the scientists who are trying to understand it. Musser guides us on an epic journey of scientific discovery into the lives of experimental physicists observing particles acting in tandem, astronomers discovering galaxies that look statistically identical, and cosmologists hoping to unravel the paradoxes surrounding the big bang. Their conclusions challenge our understanding not only of space and time but of the origins of the universe—and their insights are spurring profound technological innovation and suggesting a new grand unified theory of physics.
A Brief Illustrated History of Machines and Mechanisms (History of Mechanism and Machine Science)
explanations make little distinction between locality and nonlocality. Sometimes gods act nonlocally (they’d snap their fingers and make things happen) and sometimes they act locally (sending an emissary to do their bidding). As far as mythology is concerned, that’s a minor detail. Philosophers were people who found these character-driven narratives unsatisfying. Even if you grant the existence of Poseidon, how could he bring about an earthquake? What rules governed what he was capable of?
track baseballs and planets, they applied Newton’s laws. To build generators and electromagnets, they applied Maxwell’s equations. But what were they to do in situations that mix up motion with electromagnetism? How does a moving object affect electric and magnetic fields, and vice versa? The two theories seemed downright incompatible. One of the central features of Newton’s laws, gravity, had no place in Maxwell’s theory. Whereas electrical and magnetic forces can either push or pull, gravity
and Albert individually tell me they feel dissatisfied with their inability to connect. Zeilinger says he’s so bothered that he has hired a team member specifically to catalog the diverse interpretations of quantum mechanics and their presumptions. Albert has suggested that I organize an open debate. He says the public has an interest in sorting it out. “You’re not getting your money’s worth,” he muses. I have duly tried to get Zeilinger and Albert together, without success. Perhaps I shouldn’t
to peer beneath the surface of the world around us, and the clues are subtle, but they are no less dramatic for that. All those years of waiting and preparing for this moment have paid off, because when I see that fifty, I realize what I am seeing, and I shiver. The photons are behaving like a pair of magic coins. Galvez flips thousands of such pairs, and both always land on the same side: either both heads or both tails. That kind of thing doesn’t happen by pure dumb luck. 1.2. Sample results
life, but glimpses of an underlying order. Einstein’s point was that physicists really had no right to expect that. The world needn’t have been orderly at all. It didn’t have to abide by laws; under other circumstances, it might have been anarchic all the way down. When a friend wrote to ask Einstein what he’d meant by the comprehensibility remark, he wrote back, “A priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way.” Although Einstein said comprehensibility