Miss Buddha (41 page)

Things don’t occur spontaneously or
arbitrarily, they don’t occur for no reason, that was Einstein’s
view.

For No Reason

But in the quantum realm things do occur for
no (apparent) reason. Generally speaking, from one moment to the
next you don’t know precisely what an atom or an electron is going
to do.

Indeterminism or
uncertainty
is
the
central feature of quantum mechanics.

Einstein did not see eye to
eye with that. He championed an “objective reality”—one where you
could make a statement about the physical world
independent of how (the way in which) you observed
it
.

And that is where Bohr and Einstein
disagreed, their one pivotal disagreement. Bohr would always
maintain that the observer, and the way the quantum world was
observed, was, if not the only, then at least a vital determining
factor of what nature would now make up its mind to be (and so show
the observer).

Einstein’s vigorous objections
notwithstanding, the quantum theory was a huge success. Mysterious
effects like radioactivity could now be understood (and harnessed),
and new technologies like microelectronics were being born.

That is not to say that scientists liked
what quantum theory said about the uncertainty of nature. In fact,
many worried about that. But the theory worked, it produced
results, whether you agreed with, or understood it, or not.

And to this day, scientists have no
difficulties doing the mathematics of quantum mechanics—it all
works just fine, but they still find it impossible to understand
the full consequences of the theory, what—when all is said and
done, at the core—does it really say about nature?

For it seems—contrary to all reason and
common sense—that you have to assume one attitude, or outlook,
toward small scale objects (the micro world of atoms and subatomic
particles) and another when you work with large object (the macro
part of nature).

So, that is what the working physicist did:
viewed macro nature one way and micro nature another. No, it didn’t
really make philosophical sense, and there was always the question
of what counts as small and what counts as big, and why do they
work differently if big things are just made of lots of small
things?

Bohr—perhaps less philosophically inclined
than Einstein—arrived at the conclusion that you just have to
accept that nature is odd. Quantum theory may not make sense but,
look, you can’t argue with its applicability and its success. The
theory works, whether ugly or not.

And so, in the end, Bohr’s view of quantum
mechanics, which was to be known as “the Copenhagen
interpretation,” became the new orthodoxy of the nature of reality.
Einstein grumbling and mumbling offstage.

Bohr thought of reality has having two
perspectives, that reality contains two alternative dimensions.

And that is the Copenhagen interpretation:
Bohr postulated one reality at the microscopic level, where
everything behaved like quantum mechanics said—that things were
wavy and did not have definite positions or speeds; and then there
was another reality at the macroscopic level, obeying classical
physics where everything is definite and not so puzzling.

But as someone who constantly worried about
what is really going on, Einstein could not let this go. He was
determined to solve this apparent contradiction.

His problem, however, was that 1930s’
technology was not up to the job. There was no way to conclusively
prove things at this level one way or the other.

So, instead of approaching the problem
experimentally, Einstein and his colleagues set out to test nature
in their heads to attempt to expose the flaws in Niels Bohr’s
philosophy.

The EPR Thought Experiment

Now, remember, we are dealing with
intellectual giants here. These were theorists and thinkers that
could create and agree upon a mental universe with specific
laws—law that could then be tested; a universe that would behave
according to these laws when subjected to postulated events and
introduced variables.

But even in the elaborate thought-universe
of quantum mechanics, Einstein could not disprove Bohr’s view, or
improve upon the theory.

Let’s take a look at the most famous of
these what they called thought experiments. It was devised and
carried out by Einstein and two of his colleagues, Podolsky and
Rosen, and thus it has become known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen
(EPR) thought experiment.

It can be a little tricky to get your head
around, but let’s return to the quantum (micro) glove in the sealed
box. So here, again, we have a glove inside a box. And again,
imagine that this glove is a tiny quantum particle, only this time
we have a pair of particles, and so we have another box, with
another glove in it to make up this pair of quantum particles.

Now, we have yet to open
either of the boxes or make any measurements of the gloves, so
according to Niels Bohr, at this
unobserved
point, neither of these
gloves knows whether it is left-handed or right-handed. They are,
both of them, in a strange state of mixture of maybe left and maybe
right—if indeed, they are at all.

Here it is important to add
that while there are not many things we can know about these
quantum particles with certainty, one thing we
do
know is this: like gloves,
they come in (bonded) pairs
. But until observed, the pair remains in a strange unknown
state as to which of them is right-handed and which is
left-handed.

“Okay,” said Einstein, “I don’t believe it,
but let’s just suppose it were true, if I open one of these boxes,
we will then force nature to make a decision.”

Now, because the gloves—just like the
quantum particles—must be a pair, if you discover, upon opening one
of the boxes that it is a left-handed glove (particle), the other
glove must instantly be(come) the opposite, i.e., right-handed.

In the quantum world left
or right translates into polarity: positive or negative, or into
which way the particle spins, clockwise or anti-clockwise. If one
of the pair is one way, the other one
has
to be
the other way. This has be
experimentally proven (without a single deviation) over and over
and for so long that it is now accepted as a natural
truth.

But here’s the big question: How does the
right-handed glove (inside its unopened box) know when we open the
left-handed box, and so make sure to be its opposite (inside the
still unopened box)?

The only answer is that the
gloves obviously, one way or another, communicate with each other.
But this communication cannot be via messages (which would
themselves be particles of some kind), because, according to
Einstein’s theory of relativity, a message-particle cannot travel
faster than the speed of light—while the other of the pair
instantly
(and instantly
is a whole lot faster than the speed of light) adjusts to be the
opposite of its observed twin. (This is what Doctor Lawson
conclusively proved in April of 1999).

Also, were we to open the
boxes at
exactly
the same moment, there would be no time for a message-particle
to travel. And still, the quantum gloves would be each other’s
opposite.

This, as one scientist put
it, “is instantaneous action at a distance, and modern physics,
because of Einstein’s own theory of relativity, does not allow for
that, because things—even if travelling at the speed of light—has
to take time; and
instant
essentially means no time.

“That is why Einstein said that if you
believe quantum mechanics like it is normally understood, then you
also believe something that is inconsistent with special
relativity, and that just looks wrong.”

Moving On

The (failed) EPR thought experiment—Einstein,
Podolsky and Rosen could not disprove Bohr’s take on things—was
Einstein’s last and best challenge to the quantum theory, and after
1935 he moved on to other things. Still, he remained unconvinced
about Bohr’s quantum theory for the rest of his life, despite
Bohr’s efforts to sway him otherwise.

Actually, it really bothered Bohr that he
could never convince Einstein; it was a real aggravation to him.
Some even say that Bohr felt that he had failed because he could
not convince Einstein.

Still, as the quantum theory was refined it
became more and more successful, and despite its philosophical
difficulties most scientists just got on with it and used deployed
in their work.

This thought experiment was
to remain a thought
experiment
for decades since there was no way to physically
prove it one way or another, but in the 1960s, John Bell, a
physicist from Northern Ireland, moved things on by turning the EPR
thought experiment into something that could be practically
tested.

And after a few years of refinement, and
allowing for lab technology to catch up and be ready for the task,
the EPR thought experiment was carried out in the real world.

The Geneva Experiment

This was finally done over a tiny distance by
a French team led by Alain Aspect in the early 1980s. The result
proved Bohr’s assumption: the observation of one particle did
indeed cause the instant “opposition” of the other.

Still, this was not sufficiently convincing
for the large majority of the scientific community.

So, we fast forward to 1997, when a team at
the University of Geneva lead by Nicolas Gisin attempted the
experiment on a much large scale. They wanted to demonstrate that a
pair of quantum particles actually do have this strange,
unexplainable connection, but this time across a whole city.

For this experiment they first had to create
a bonded pair of quantum particles: a pair of photons, particles of
light. And, as always and just like gloves, one photon must be the
opposite of the other.

The plan was to then separate them by ten
kilometers and then measure them at exactly the same moment.

Timed correctly—and being Swiss they had the
clocking thing down—there would then be no time for a message to
pass between the photons, even at ten times the speed of light.

In this experiment they
first isolated one photon and then, by firing it at a non-linear
crystal,
divided it into two, bonded twin
photons—
together now forming what they
termed a single quantum system.

One of these twin-photons was then sent down
one fiber strand to travel about five kilometers to the south,
while the other twin-photon was sent down another strand of fiber
to travel five kilometers to the north.

At ten kilometers apart, a measurement was
made at the exact same time.

Said Nicolas Gisin in a
subsequent interview, “Measuring the northbound photon forced it to
assume a measurable property, with the effect that
instantaneously—in theory, and certainly faster than light in
practice—the southbound photon acquired the opposite
property—
every
time.

“The output on one side was always
completely random, the outcome on the other side was also always
completely random, however, the two outcomes were always opposite.
Always. Always.”

Not only did the researchers not know which
photon had which property, but according quantum theory, and well
confirmed by the experiment, the photons themselves did not know
until one of the twins was measured.

One way of stating that is that nature
itself does not know what it is until viewed by life.

Bohr 1 - Einstein 0.

So, nature is, if you will, at the subatomic
level, and as I’ve pointed out, just plain weird.

Until someone makes a measurement, two
bonded photons exist in a tangled-up state, both being and not
being at the same time, while also, somehow, being intimately
connected whether side by side or across vast distances.

According to quantum mechanics, the two
photons would maintain this intimate and instant connection even
across galaxies. This, of course, is more difficult to test and
prove, but it’s a fascinating (and correct) prediction.

While most scientists agree that this is the
case, this does not mean that science understands what is going on
here, not really. Both philosophers and physicists are still trying
to make sense out of this paradox.

Non-Local Communication

What is occurring between these two bonded
twins has been termed non-local communication.

What exactly is it? The
short answer is: It is the
instant
exchange of information between
particles.

A longer answer would be: It is the instant
exchange of information that by virtue of not being local (where
local is defined as place consisting of space and time) and so not
occupying time at all, indeed takes zero time to exchange.

In fact, in non-local communication, there
is no particle exchange involved. There cannot be. There is no
message-particle traversing distance. There is simply a shared
knowing, one particle to another, which—regardless of physical
distance between them—does not take a thousandth, nor a millionth,
nor a billionth of a second, nor a trillionth or a trillionth of a
trillionth of a second, but is truly instant.

Much should have been made about the 1997
Geneva experiment; and even more should have been made of Doctor
Lawson’s April 1999 experiment—which showed, on an incontrovertible
scale, that non-local communication does indeed exist.