FreThink

The human mind makes certain assumptions about reality every moment whether we’re aware of it or not. As often as not those assumptions are reliable as far as physical, macro-level phenomena go (e.g. gravity will prevent me from floating off into space) yet we are often grossly ignorant of how it all works on the subatomic level. We trust the work of people like Einstein and Bohr, we know that numerous other’s have tested and challenged the Theory of Relativity, we subconsciously accept it as fact and depend on it to keep working.

Just about the time the slowest among us (I’m in that crowd) have managed to forge a rough understanding of Einsteinian physics someone comes along and suggests that we’re all wrong, that reality is truly and wonderfully weirder on the very smallest scale than we previously imagined. Technology is taking us further down the path of understanding, but I think we often fail to appreciate how long that path really is. It may even extend into other universes, other realities we can’t even hypothesize yet.

David Z Albert and Rivka Galchen writing in Scientific American:

Our intuition, going back forever, is that to move, say, a rock, one has to touch that rock, or touch a stick that touches the rock, or give an order that travels via vibrations through the air to the ear of a man with a stick that can then push the rock—or some such sequence. This intuition, more generally, is that things can only directly affect other things that are right next to them. If A affects B without being right next to it, then the effect in question must be indirect—the effect in question must be something that gets transmitted by means of a chain of events in which each event brings about the next one directly, in a manner that smoothly spans the distance from A to B. Every time we think we can come up with an exception to this intuition—say, flipping a switch that turns on city street lights (but then we realize that this happens through wires) or listening to a BBC radio broadcast (but then we realize that radio waves propagate through the air)—it turns out that we have not, in fact, thought of an exception. Not, that is, in our everyday experience of the world.

We term this intuition “locality.”

Quantum mechanics has upended many an intuition, but none deeper than this one. And this particular upending carries with it a threat, as yet unresolved, to special relativity—a foundation stone of our 21st-century physics.

Entanglement lies behind the new and exceedingly promising fields of quantum computation and quantum cryptography, which could provide the ability to solve certain problems that are beyond the practical range of an ordinary computer and the ability to communicate with guaranteed security from eavesdropping [see "Quantum Computing with Ions," by Christopher R. Monroe and David J. Wineland; Scientific American, August 2008].

But entanglement also appears to entail the deeply spooky and radically counterintuitive phenomenon called nonlocality—the possibility of physically affecting something without touching it or touching any series of entities reaching from here to there. Nonlocality implies that a fist in Des Moines can break a nose in Dallas without affecting any other physical thing (not a molecule of air, not an electron in a wire, not a twinkle of light) anywhere in the heartland.

The greatest worry about nonlocality, aside from its overwhelming intrinsic strangeness, has been that it intimates a profound threat to special relativity as we know it. In the past few years this old worry—finally allowed inside the house of serious thinking about physics—has become the centerpiece of debates that may finally dismantle, distort, reimagine, solidify or seed decay into the very foundations of physics.

The crucial question is whether the nonlocalities that at least appear to be present in the quantum-mechanical algorithm are merely apparent or something more. Bell seems to have been the first person to ask himself precisely what that question means. What could make genuine physical nonlocalities distinct from merely apparent ones? He reasoned that if any manifestly and completely local algorithm existed that made the same predictions for the outcomes of experiments as the quantum-mechanical algorithm does, then Einstein and Bohr would have been right to dismiss the nonlocalities in quantum mechanics as merely an artifact of that particular formalism. Conversely, if no algorithm could avoid nonlocalities, then they must be genuine physical phenomena. Bell then analyzed a specific entanglement scenario and concluded that no such local algorithm was mathematically possible.

And so the actual physical world is nonlocal. Period.

This conclusion turns everything upside down. Einstein, Bohr and everyone else had always taken it for granted that any genuine incompatibility between quantum mechanics and the principle of locality would be bad news for quantum mechanics. But Bell had now shown that locality was incompatible not merely with the abstract theoretical apparatus of quantum mechanics but with certain of its empirical predictions as well. Experimenters—in particular work by Alain Aspect of the Institute of Optics in Palaiseau, France, and his co-workers in 1981 and later—have left no doubt that those predictions are indeed correct. The bad news, then, was not for quantum mechanics but for the principle of locality—and thus, presumably, for special relativity, because it at least appears to rely on a presumption of locality.

The status of special relativity, just more than a century after it was presented to the world, is suddenly a radically open and rapidly developing question. This situation has come about because physicists and philosophers have finally followed through on the loose ends of Einstein’s long- neglected argument with quantum mechanics—an irony-laden further proof of Einstein’s genius. The diminished guru may very well have been wrong just where we thought he was right and right just where we thought he was wrong. We may, in fact, see the universe through a glass not quite so darkly as has too long been insisted.

Editor’s Note: This story was originally published with the title “A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity”

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