DEE WILSON CONSULTING

​After reading and rereading, The Quantum Universe (2011) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, two English physicists, and reading multiple times the first chapter of Robert Mann's textbook, An Introduction to Particle Physics and the Standard Model (2010), I reread Spooky Action At A Distance (2015) by George Musser, a science journalist.  Musser's book is billed as a discussion of entanglement, i.e., the correlation of a specific property of two or more (hundreds, thousands, millions, billions) sub-atomic particles that have been in close proximity or interacted without a signal transmitted from one particle to its entangled partner. 

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Musser explains entanglement of particles through the metaphor of quantum "coins," a property of a particle that can only be 'a' or 'b,' without describing specific properties (such as spin) that are entangled. In their more recent book, Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe (2022) Cox and Forshaw comment: 

 

"Entanglement has no counterpart vin our everyday experience which is why it appears counterintuitive ... Entangled objects that are very far apart 'feel' each other's influence instantaneously because they should really be viewed as a single connected system. ... There are electrons in your hand and electrons in the Andromeda Galaxy linked through quantum entanglement." (pp. 209-10)

 

Cox and Forshaw utilize the idea of a quantum bit or "quibit." They comment: "An ordinary bit is like a switch; it can only have two values which we might call on or off or 0 and 1. However qubits have an unusual feature: "they can be both 0 and 1 at the same time. Whenever we measure the value of a quibit it will return either a 0 or a 1, but before hand it can be mixture of both." (p.210) According to Cox and Forshaw, a photon (particle of light) "behaves as a single quibit. It possesses a property known as spin, which can be either 0 or 1. Photons, like electrons, can be entangled based on their histories of creation or proximity. 

                 

There was a period in past decades when physicists debated whether entanglement of particles indicated a violation of the law that information can not travel faster than the speed of light. No longer. In The Quantum Universe, Cox and Forshaw assert: " ... the idea that a particle can be here, and an instant later, somewhere else very far way is not in itself a contradiction with Einstein's theories, because the real statement is that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, and it turns out quantum theory remains constrained by that. ... the dynamics corresponding to a particle leaping across the Universe are the very opposite of information transfer ..." As a consequence, Musser points out that entanglement, a phenomenon that has been repeatedly confirmed by clever experiments, cannot be used to achieve the instantaneous transmission of signals. Entanglement does not occur through information transfer, but, as Musser maintains, through some poorly understood identity that transcends spacetime. "Spooky action at a distance" is therefore a misleading book title and concept: none of the four fundamental forces ( gravity, electromagnetism, strong force and weak force) are responsible for entanglement, and there is no action at a distance. Instead, according to Musser, entanglement calls into question the nature of space and time. It is fertile ground for both physics and philosophy. 

 

Before discussing Musser's account of entanglement, it is useful to quote from The Quantum Universe and An Introduction to Particle Physics: 

 

 " ... the proposition that a particle should be in many places at once is actually a rather clear statement, even if it sounds silly. ... with this 'a particle can be in more than one place at once' we are moving away from our everyday experience and into uncharted territory." ( Cox and Forshaw, p. 28)

 

" Note that indistinguishable means just that - two elementary particles of the same type are perfect duplicates of one another. It is simply not possible by any measurement we can make to tell one electron apart from another or put a label on one ...to distinguish it from another.  (Mann, p. 10) 

 

If subatomic particles of the same type are indistinguishable, how can they be "entangled" based on their history of interaction? Cox and Forshaw state: "electrons do come in two types, ...'spin up' or 'spin down'  and the two are distinguished by having opposite values of their angular momentum..."When electrons or photons are entangled, their spin status, i.e. 'up' or 'down', are correlated, either the same or polarized.   

 

A particle that can be in two places at once, or many places at once, and can travel by an infinity of routes to a specific location where it is observed, is not like particles that can be observed outside a scientific laboratory.  Musser questions the conflation of "particle" with "particle like." In the double slit experiment that Cox and Forshaw discuss at length, electrons are transmitted by a source at a barrier with two slits. Some electrons can be tracked through one slit or the other, but appear on the screen that receives them distributed like waves, i.e., with interference patterns. Cox and Forshaw state: "we will assume that the elementary building blocks of Nature are particles. This has been confirmed by the double slit experiment, where the electrons always arrive at specific places on the screen, but by a whole host of other experiments."  (p. 27) However, they quote (and then ignore) Richard Feynman, whose approach to quantum physics they adopt:  "Subatomic particles, Feynman wrote, 'do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights and springs, or like anything else you have ever seen.' "  (p. 27) 

 

Musser questions the concept of particles: "looking for particles is like playing a shell game. You can't get a fix on them, you see them disappear from one spot and reappear in another, you can't even agree on how many there are. ... The only claim to the term "particle"  is that they represent discrete chunks of energy and momentum ... and when fields are interacting intensely, waves are so jumbled that particles no longer exist, even by a liberal definition." (p. 136) 

 

Musser's account of entanglement differs in one crucial respect from summaries of scientists (NASA, Cal-Tech) on line who assert that once particles become entangled they are entangled forever.  Musser states:  "... each pair of entangled particles is strictly one time use only. Using a string of these particles you can send your friend a code key. Once your friend reads the key, the entanglement is broken." (p.118) It is unclear whether Musser is discussing a specific use of entangled particles or entanglement in general, but this appears to be a disagreement between Musser and other authoritative sources. 

 

One of the many strengths of Musser's book is his discussion of explanations in physics that assume locality, i.e., the interaction of matter at scales both large and small at specific locations, and non- locality, phenomena such as gravity that operate regardless of physical interactions of particles, fields or objects.  In Musser's view, entanglement is a non- local phenomenon: "Non- local phenomena leap out of space; they have no place in its confines. They hint at a level of reality deeper than space where the concept of distance ceases to apply, where things that appear to lie far apart are actually nearby or perhaps are the same thing manifested in more than one place." (p. 168)  It is uncertain whether the idea that entangled particles might be the "the same thing manifested in more than one place" is different in meaning from the more common view that entangled particles are two particles with correlated spin properties. What could distinguish' same particle/ different particles' once  an underlying identity has been acknowledged? 

 

One of the surprising features of Spooky Action At A Distance is that most of the physicists Musser, a science journalist, interviews have so little light to shed regarding the meaning of entanglement. Musser has more philosophical insight than most of the physicists whose views he summarizes.  He believes that space includes "a tangle of relationships" which "Through some organizing principle or simply the play of averages, those relationships become regimented, so that they can be laid out on a spatial grid and interact in only in strictly prescribed ways." ( p. 182) In Musser's account, space is an emergent property of unimaginably dense networks of relationships among physical entities rather than a container in which matter exists.  

 

I have another perspective on entanglement, which is that it is another expression of the principle that creation occurs in dualities, often with polarities, in the quantum realm at every instant. Quantum physics is replete with dualities: matter/anti-matter, particles/anti-particles, particles/ waves, particles that create mass (fermions)/particles that mediate forces (bosons), particles with integer/half integer spins. Entangled particles are dualities, some of which involve polarities other than location. Somehow, this pattern in particle physics has been ignored by physicists who nevertheless describe duality/ polarity in every part of the quantum world. 

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Musser summarizes decades of speculation by physicists searching for a plausible mechanism  to explain entanglement or to explain it away. Having failed in this endeavor, physicists with a philosophical bent have, Musser, began to reexamine the concept of space. What does not appear to have occurred to date is a rethinking of the meaning of 'same' and 'different' in the quantum realm where elementary particles of the same type are indistinguishable except for location and spin, and where location is indeterminate in many circumstances. 

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-- Dee Wilson

 

deewilson13@aol.com