“Universe proves Einstein right, again!” is a headline editors love to write. “We”—or at least “they”—love to think of old Doc Einstein, with his lamb-like innocence and basset-hound eyes, floating somewhere up in the etherium and looking down on us all and, somehow, looking out for us all.
When it comes to relativity, or gravity, it seems that the good doc did get it right. But when it comes to everything else, aka electromagnetism, the “strong” force, and the “weak” force—everything known as “quantum mechanics”—the old doc got it all wrong.
A recent article in the Atlantic, “The Universe Is as Spooky as Einstein Thought”, by Natalie Wolchover, should be titled “The Universe Is ‘Spooky’, Contrary to What Einstein Thought”. Actually, Natalie tells us as much in her first sentence: “There might be no getting around what Albert Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’,” though she doesn’t explain that Einstein intended the statement as a dismissal, not an affirmation. A theory that prescribed “spooky action at a distance” had to be wrong. But the experiment that Wolchover describes confirms, seemingly to the extent physically possible, that “spooky action at a distance”, aka “photon entanglement”, does occur. A lot, as a matter of fact.
Afterwords
To paraphrase Richard Nixon, I’m not a physicist, but I do read books. Steven Weinberg, who is a physicist, with a Nobel to prove it, has a recent article expressing his continuing frustration with what people these days generally call “quantum weirdness”, reflecting Einstein’s frustration with the idea of a dice-wielding deity. Earlier Nobel winners Niels Bohr and Richard Feynman seemed to regard the ability to live with quantum weirdness as a proof of one’s manhood. Only a sissy wants “causality”! Plato got it wrong! Those “shadows” aren’t shadows! There’s no “reality” that “explains” them! What you see is what there is! The fact that so many physicists are unhappy with the state of their science is “interesting”, but it’s up to them to fix it.
