So spooky action at a distance was Einstein’s kind of appellation for the idea of nonlocality.
Non-locality is the technical term for it. And what it means is that there’s a connection
between different objects or places in the universe. There’s some kind of link or bond
between particles or places or just objects in general that can be quite far apart from
one another. In principle they can be on the other side of the universe even. And the natural
world is filled with connections of different sorts. That’s really what science is all
about making sense of those connections. But what’s unusual about these connections is
there doesn’t seem to be a connector. There’s no mechanism that actually relates the object
in one place to the object in the other. And yet those objects still act in unison. They’re
able to coordinate what they do. So that’s kind of the mystery of this whole subject
why Einstein thought it was spooky that there was this connection and yet no seeming mechanism
to explain it. This phenomenon of nonlocality that worried Einstein actually comes out in
many different ways. So the original way that Einstein was worried about concerned subatomic
particles. So electrons, photons, neutrons, ions, you know, small things because they’re
just easy to manipulate. And what you would do is you would create them together or you
might bring them together and it has some kind of interaction and you develop a connection
between them. They develop some kind of bond. And then they separate and in the original
experiments they would go to the other side of the laboratory or the laboratory bench.
And then they got more sophisticated and went to the other side of the city or the island
chain. And in principle you could take it as a set to the other side of the known universe
or even the unknown universe. And then once they have it in those – the two particles
in this case in those remote locations they manipulate them. They perform some kind of
action on them. They might measure them just to see what their properties are. And they
can do that in several different ways. And what turns out to happen is that the particles
are able to coordinate. They come up with the same measurement values.
So the example I often give is two coins. So you can treat some of these particles as
having two possible outcomes of a measurement. And you can think about it as heads or tails
of a coin. So you create two of them. You give one to your friend. Your friend goes
off somewhere and you keep the other. And you both flip the coin and you come up with
heads, they come up with heads. You come up with tails, they come up with tails. Heads,
tails. It just goes back and forth. And yet they’re the same answer on both sides. And
again there’s no mechanism. There’s no reason they would be. They scientists have
gone through the different possible tricks like, for instance, are they double sided
coins? Are they trick coins? And they’ve kind of done experiments to rule that out.
Is there some kind of surreptitious radio signal passing between them. They’ve ruled
that out. Is there some kind of predetermination? I mean they would have gone through all the
options and yet they can’t explain why these coins land on the same side. But now I think
the progress of science and understanding the nature of space and time have taken us
to a possible explanation. So if you think of those two coins they’re on opposite sides
of the universe or the continent or wherever they may be. But they act as though they’re
right next to one another. They act as though they’re kind of nuzzled up together. So
they don’t seem to have any distance between them. They’re acting as though there’s
no distance between them although if you go and measure the distance it’s enormous.
So the proposition is that the distance between them is somehow an illusion, it’s somehow
kind of a mirage. Or maybe a better way of putting it, it’s a construction that those
particles or those coins, the metaphor, are rooted in a layer of reality where the distance
doesn’t seem to exist. They’re juxtaposed even though they look like they’re far apart.
And the distance is real to us. So it’s real at our level of reality but it’s not
real to the particles. So the idea is that the concept of space, of distance, all the
spatial concepts we deal with in science are emerging from that deeper level. They’re
not fundamental in the world. They’re derivative.