Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

by George Musser

What is space? It isn't a question that most of us normally ask. Space is the venue of physics; it's where things exist, where they move and take shape. Yet over the past few decades, physicists have discovered a phenomenon that operates outside the confines of space and time: nonlocality-the ability of two particles to act in harmony no matter how far apart they may be. It appears to be almost magical. Einstein grappled with this oddity and couldn't come to terms with it, describing it as "spooky action at a distance." More recently, the mystery has deepened as other forms of nonlocality have been uncovered. This strange occurrence, which has direct connections to black holes, particle collisions, and even the workings of gravity, holds the potential to undermine our most basic understandings of physical reality. If space isn't what we thought it was, then what is it?
In Spooky Action at a Distance, George Musser sets out to answer that question, offering a provocative exploration of nonlocality and a celebration of the scientists who are trying to explain it. Musser guides us on an epic journey into the lives of experimental physicists observing particles acting in tandem, astronomers finding galaxies that look statistically identical, and cosmologists hoping to unravel the paradoxes surrounding the big bang. He traces the often contentious debates over nonlocality through major discoveries and disruptions of the twentieth century and shows how scientists faced with the same undisputed experimental evidence develop wildly different explanations for that evidence. Their conclusions challenge our understanding of not only space and time but also the origins of the universe-and they suggest a new grand unified theory of physics. Delightfully readable, Spooky Action at a Distance is a mind-bending voyage to the frontiers of modern physics that will change the way we think about reality.

Long-listed for the 2016 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
“An important book that provides insight into key new developments in our understanding of the nature of space, time and the universe. It will repay careful study.” —John Gribbin, The Wall Street Journal

“An endlessly surprising foray into the current mother of physics' many knotty mysteries, the solving of which may unveil the weirdness of quantum particles, black holes, and the essential unity of nature.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Genres: Science, Physics, Nonfiction, Space, Audiobook, History, Philosophy

304 pages, Hardcover

First published November 3, 2015

About the author

George Musser is a contributing editor for Scientific American and Nautilus magazines, where he focuses on space science and fundamental physics. He is the recipient of the 2011 Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics and the 2010 Jonathan Eberhart Planetary Sciences Journalism Award from the American Astronomical Society. Musser was one of the lead editors for the magazine's single-topic issue “A Matter of Time” (Sept. 2002), which won a National Magazine Award for editorial excellence, and he coordinated the single-topic issue “Crossroads for Planet Earth” (Sept. 2005), which was a NMA finalist and won the 2005 Global Media Award from the Population Institute. He is a member of the Foundational Questions Institute and was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT from 2014 to 2015. Follow him on Mastodon at @[email protected].

Reviews

[Lois Bujold · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, hm. Not a book for novices in the subject matters of either quantum or Einsteinian physics, although the author is quite good at not putting anything in math. (Reading some pop sci, one can almost sense the pain of the scientist-authors curtailing the equations at the demand of their editors -- they do like to show their work.) If you have been following it all more closely than I have at a science-fan level, you might not feel as if you need to back up and read some more first.

The book does not so much teach as report, in this case on the then-current (circa 2014, as this was pubbed 2015) bleeding-edge bun-fight physics. Here I was hoping physics was almost done, but no. Physicists don't want to put themselves out of work any more than anyone else, I guess.

At six hefty chapters, the book is not actually that long, as almost half of the pages are taken up with footnotes, references, and an index, speaking of showing one's work. The author works hard at putting some pretty subtle stuff into graspable verbal metaphors which, at a borderline where physics and philosophy begin to be hard to tell apart, is pretty much what has to be done anyway. I am NOT going to attempt to summarize it, a recursive exercise since it's already just that. Each grammatical and well-constructed sentence made sense while I was reading it, but I think I need to drop back and pick up some more background on the quantum stuff before giving this another go.

I think I am becoming increasingly interested in time, the elephant in the physics living room. I'd watched a good Great Course by Sean Carroll on the subject https://www.thegreatcourses.com/cours... but that's a decade older now, too.

Onwards...

L.

(Also strongly recced: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/cours... )

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book begins with the spooky action at a distance (a.k.a. nonlocality) that's been part of physics since Newton (i.e. gravity). When Isaac Newton first inserted a gravitational constant into his equation for universal gravitation, he was accused of incorporating occult magic into the study of physics. But his equations correctly described the path of orbiting planets and falling apples so we all got used to the concept.

Then electricity and magnetism came along with their own examples of spooky action at a distance. They've become a part of our everyday life, and we give them little thought to their apparent magical properties.

Other things have come along since that are hard to believe at first such as general relativity and uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. But after years of empirical testing that support the predictions made by these concepts they become easy to accept with little worry about that fact that they don't appear to make sense based our day-to-day human perceptions of physical reality.

We are now at a point in the advancement of physics where it appears that another sacred cow may be destroyed. The apparent ability of separated quantum entangled particles to communicate their physical states to each other while physically separated from each other and to do so instantaneously (faster than the speed of light) now appears to have physicists divided into two camps. First, there are the experimentalists who are blithely performing Bell's inequality tests and trying to prove superluminal communication with no loopholes. And Second, there are the theorists who appear to be going to extreme lengths to come up with a myriad variety of theories to explain why this can or can't possibly happen.

Many theorists seem to insist that information can't possibly travel faster than light because that would allow prediction of future events. (Apparently they haven't seen the movie "Back To The Future.")

The book then proceeds to discuss other apparent "spooky actions at a distance" that become apparent when one looks closely at quantum mechanics, gravity and black holes. What happens to the remaining particle when its entangled partner enters a black hole? All sorts of quantum things seems to bump into each other when black holes enter the discussion.

The book provides several alternative theories to explain nonlocality. One theory is that space is illusory, and that nonlocality is fundamental. Huh? From this point on I understood very little of this book. It occurred to me that I may be wasting my time trying to understand stuff where the smartest minds in the world don't know what's going on. Perhaps as science advances they'll settle on a single theory instead of having so many different competing alternative theories.

[John Gribbin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Albert Einstein used the term “spooky action at a distance” to refer to the way that, according to quantum theory, particles that have once interacted with one another remain in some sense “entangled” even when they are far apart. Poke one particle, in the right quantum-mechanical way, and the other particle jumps, instantly, even if it is on the other side of the Universe. He did not mean the term as a compliment, and did not believe that the effect could be real. Alas for Einstein (but fortunately, perhaps, after his death) experiments based on the theoretical work of the physicist John Bell proved that this entanglement is real. More precisely, they proved that something called “local reality”, which is a feature of everyday commonsense, is not real.

Local reality says that there is a real Universe out there, even when we are not observing it (trees that fall in the woods make a noise even if nobody is there to hear it). The “local” bit of the name says that these real objects can only influence one another by influences that travel at less than or equal to the speed of light. There is no instantaneous linkage. The experiments show that the combination, local reality, does not hold. The simplest explanation is that “locality” is violated – spooky action at a distance. Alternatively, there may not be a real world out there which exists independently of our measurements. In that case, the conceptual problems arise because we are trying to imagine what “particles” are like when they are not being measured; if we discard the idea of such a reality, we can preserve locality. And if you really want a sleepless night, consider that both locality and reality may be violated.

George Musser’s book is likely to invoke such sleepless nights. He starts off with Bell’s work and its implications, building up through a rundown of the history of the development of quantum physics. This, you should be warned, is the easy bit. Having established that local reality is not a valid description of how the Universe works, Musser takes us out into far deeper waters. Quantum field theory is just the beginning, and introduces another form of non-locality. Then the general theory of relativity and black holes offer up another candidate for this entanglement, now see as a universal effect, not something that only particle physicists have to worry about. After all, the general theory allows for the existence of so-called “wormholes”, tunnels through space and time that link different parts of spacetime – distant parts of Universe, or (conceivably, although Musser does not elaborate on this) different universes. A wormhole is intrinsically nonlocal. Some theorists have suggested that mini-wormholes might link entangled particles, and explain their shared properties.

The island of knowledge that we are swimming towards, frantically trying to keep afloat, is that both space and time are illusions. Non-locality is the natural order of things, and space itself is manufactured out of non-local building blocks. “Locality,” says Musser, “becomes the puzzle,” but so is the nature of those building blocks. The analogy he uses to explain this involves water. Individually, the building blocks of water – molecules – are not wet, but collectively they produce the sensation of wetness. Individually, the building blocks of the Universe, yet to be identified, are not spacial, but collectively they produce the sensation of space.

This is tough going, and in spite of the author’s heroic efforts to make difficult concepts comprehensible, he does not always succeed. But the ideas he discusses, such as matrix theory, or the possibility that “our” Universe is a holographic image projected from some higher reality, are at the cutting edge of physics today, and nobody should expect all the loose ends to be neatly tied up.

Indeed, the most powerful message to take from this book is tucked away, almost apologetically, near the end. Science is all about debate, and progress is made by arguing about cherished (but not necessarily correct) ideas, until some consensus emerges. When the consensus is reached, the physicists become bored and move on to something new. The sound of physicists arguing is the sound of science making progress. That is the “sound” of this book. But “yesterday’s drag-out fights are tomorrow’s homework problems”, as Musser succinctly puts it.

As this example illustrates, he has a neat turn of phrase which helps to make the difficult ideas described here slightly less difficult to comprehend. But don’t think “less difficult” means “easy.” Spooky Action at a Distance is an important book which provides insight into key new developments in our understanding of the nature of space, time and the Universe. It will repay careful study, and I am sure it will become a well-thumbed feature of my reference shelf, while the extensive bibliography will help those who want to delve further. But it is not something you can digest in a single reading.

[Emma Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a fun read. The author does an amazing job of making the science understandable (mostly) while the prose is light on its feet and very entertaining. Highly recommend.

[Charlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides a great summary of the work being done in the area of nonlocality. Musser offers an extremely clear and relatable explanation of the problems involved in trying to reconcile quantum physics with relativity. Can spacetime be boiled down to entanglement in fields? Is it the entanglement of fields that gave rise to the entanglement of particles (if you can call them particles) that make up everything we know? How can we understand both space and time in a more accurate way?

The description of this book uses the word "mind bending" and rightfully so. This is a great book to listen to (great narration) while imagining the strange nature of the universe in which we live.

[sigurd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tennyson diceva che se riuscissimo a capire davvero una rosa, avremmo capito cosa è l'universo; cioè il rapporto spazio-temporale tra le cose è così rigidamente articolato, che basta la conoscenza di una di queste per avere la chiave per risalire alle cause prime. Tennyson insomma, come Einstein, era un fan del principio di località. Le cose hanno un'esistenza, sono provviste di un proprio spazio, in questo consiste la loro esistenza, e influenzano quelle vicino, ma non superano mai un certo limite di velocità (la velocità della luce), con il rischio di ritrovarsi in contraddizioni logiche impensabili. se superassi la velocità della luce, infatti, come dice andrea capocci, potrei tornare nel passato, uccidere mio nonno e creare i presupposti per non essere sigurd. e ora non sarei qui a scrivere questo commento. e voi avreste le allucinazioni visive, sareste pazzi, come ho sempre pensato.

[Gabriela Ventura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deixem-me começar por uma digressão:

várias resenhas sobre esse livro aqui no Goodreads se ressentem do fato de não haver equações e "hard science" nele. Um dos usuários inclusive externa sua frustração dizendo que o autor parece estar escrevendo para ~gente de humanas~ (na verdade o termo era "literature majors") - que evidentemente não vão se interessar pelo livro.

Ei! O público-alvo tá aqui, firme e forte. Spooky action at a distance é um livro de divulgação científica. Basicamente o propósito desse tipo de livro é tornar conceitos complexos palatáveis para pessoas interessadas, porém sem formação científica. No caso: euzinha. E fazia tempo que eu não me deparava com uma prosa tão desembaraçada na área. E, não fosse suficiente a clareza, George Musser ainda tem um senso de humor peculiar: quantas vezes você pode dizer que deu gargalhadas em um texto sobre física? Pois é.

Dito isso, emaranhamento quântico é um conceito muito, mas muito bizarro. Sério, dê um google, procure um vídeo no YouTube, LEIA ESSE LIVRO. A primeira vez que ouvi falar sobre isso foi em um filme, e num contexto muito mais poético do que científico (mais uma vez: #teamhumanas). Mas as implicações são bizarras. Não à toa Einstein ficou tão frustrado com o fenômeno que o apelidou de "spooky". George Musser explica não só os fundamentos e a história do conceito, mas dá conta das diversas polêmicas levantadas pela comunidade científica a respeito da validade e aplicação da teoria ao longo dos anos.

É um livro fascinante. A galera de humanas pira. Juro.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

far more than a primer or introduction into nonlocality, quantum entanglement, and relativity, george musser's spooky action at a distance (so named for einstein's quote relating to quantum mechanics) is a fascinating, at times challenging exploration of modern physics. musser, an award-winning science writer, offers a thorough history of physics through the centuries, arriving at the present moment when we're still attempting to understand and untangle the mysteries of the universe. despite the inherent headiness of his subject, musser is able to skillfully articulate competing theories of space and time - even while employing ample humor in his writing. spooky action at a distance is utterly intriguing and will leave the curious and engaged reader with both insight and wonder.

the world we experience possesses all the qualities of locality. we have a strong sense of place and of the relations among places. we feel the pain of separation from those we love and the impotence of being too far away from something we want to affect. and yet quantum mechanics and other branches of physics now suggest that, at a deeper level, there may be no such thing as place and no such thing as distance. physics experiments can bind the fate of two particles together, so that they behave like a pair of magic coins: if you flip them, each will land on heads or tails — but always on the same side as its partner. they act in a coordinated way even though no force passes through the space between them. those particles might zip off to opposite sides of the universe, and still they act in unison. these particles violate locality. they transcend space.

[Thom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book which delves into modern physics, both quantum entanglement and locality. To do that, the author starts with an accessible history of these (and related) concepts. When he comes back to the present focus, the going gets tougher... and stranger.

Partly that's because we don't have the answers. One major point is that science is about debate, with the most progress made by discussion between champions of ideas. In this book, the author mentions some of those champions and the ebb and flow of their cases - and that can require a deeper understanding of physics than I possess.

The author does attempt to put these ideas in easier terms, and frequently returns to earlier metaphors with new wrinkles. In the earlier part of the book, this works very well. For an excellent explanation of Einstein's "Spooky Action at a Distance", this can't be beat. Another major plus is the excellent bibliography.

In conclusion, there's no consensus yet. I plan to read more about gravitational waves before returning to reread this book, and possibly expand my review. Until then, a solid 4 stars.

[Jon Ureña · Rating 5 out of 5]

A consistent mindfuck. I love science books that make me feel as if I'm peering into the abyss. There's no better nor darker abyss than quantum nonlocality and entanglement, and how they suggest that space is emergent and not a fundamental building block of nature. I hope one day we'll discover how to jump from point to point thanks to a mix of nonlocality and entanglement, to avoid that whole "travelling" thing, which makes the nearest star too far away. However, this is one abyss of which we might never be equipped to imagine our way out.

[Galen Weitkamp · Rating 2 out of 5]

Spooky Action at a Distance by George Musser
and
Quantum Mechanics the Theoretical Minimum by Leonard Susskind and Art Friedman

Reviewed by Galen Weitkamp

Perhaps it’s unfair to compare these two works given the differences in the intent of their authors. George Musser is fascinated by what some identify as the nonlocal nature of the measurement process in quantum theory. It seems to this reader that his intent is not only to inform but to convince the reader of its “reality” and the consequences that “reality” would have for our conception of space and time. Susskind and Friedman, on the other hand, are excited (in the way teachers are) by the power of knowledge. Their intent is to convey that excitement by teaching their readers a little bit of real quantum mechanics.

Both books are for the layperson, although the latter is probably for the more serious layperson (you have to know a little bit of calculus). Both books discuss the key notion behind allegedly nonlocal behavior, namely entangled systems. One book succeeds whereas, in my opinion, the other does not.

Musser is very much concerned with an experiment known as the EPR-experiment. It was an experiment proposed in a 1935 paper by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen. Two entangled particles are sent in opposite directions, one toward Alice and the other toward Bob. Because they are components of one entangled system, neither particle has a determinate spin. Alice’s component only acquires a spin when she measures it. According to one interpretation of quantum theory, the instant she measures it the state of the whole system collapses and Bob’s particle acquires a spin too, a spin which will be in the opposite direction of Alice’s particle. Einstein pointed out there would be no time for the cause to propagate from Alice’s location to Bob’s and that this “Spooky action at a distance” was counter to the spirit of the special theory of relativity.

Nevertheless, the predictions of quantum theory are born out. The EPR experiment has been carried out countless times. Countless pairs of Alices and Bobs have made simultaneous measurements, compared them and found the results are correlated exactly as quantum mechanics predicts. Musser is convinced this is an important clue to a new conception of space and time, the implications of which are that space or time or both are unreal, nonlocal, emergent or composed from related entities that have no location.

Another interpretation of quantum theory maintains that when Alice measures the spin of her component of the entangled system, she becomes entangled with the system as well. When Bob measures his component he too becomes part of a larger entangled system which includes the two particles, Alice, her brain cells, her notes and records of the experiment as well as his own. Although they are entangled, they cannot compare notes immediately, they must wait until they meet or at least until the messages they send each other have sufficient time to reach their destinations. Suppose they meet as soon as possible and share their information. Since they had to wait, the perturbations caused by their measurements had time to propagate and merge. According to this interpretation of quantum mechanics, this later merger is responsible for the correlations between Alice’s and Bob’s results. The time delay avoids the spooky action at a distance and keeps quantum theory intact. Indeed, Susskind and Friedman neatly demonstrate that no information can be transferred instantaneously across space by any sort of measurement process.

Without a doubt this is a fascinating subject, but without the appropriate background it is difficult to appreciate the subtlety of the phenomenon, understand the problems, the proposed solutions and it is certainly difficult to assess them.

Susskind and Friedman give us a place to start: the concept of quantum spin. When I was a student, most textbooks on quantum mechanics started with continuous systems, free particles and the oscillators. “The Theoretical Minimum” is not a textbook. It’s a guide, rather, for serious amateurs. The emphasis on spin allows the reader to see that quantum theory is about logic and information. Quantum spins are analogous to classical “bits” that can be “on” or “off,” except quantum spins follow a non-Boolean logic. Susskind and Friedman reformulate the EPR-experiment as an attempt to simulate Alice’s and Bob’s measurements with a classical computer. They demonstrate it can’t be done. They also point out, “This is not a problem for quantum mechanics. It’s a problem for simulating quantum mechanics with a classical Boolean computer.”

I found “Spooky Action at a Distance” to be unhelpful, sometimes snide and often slanted. “The Theoretical Minimum was very helpful, kind and honest.

There are a lot of good books on math and physics for the layperson: George Gamow’s One, Two, Three...Infinity, Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach or Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality. Like Susskind and Friedman, George Gamow just wants to teach and excite the reader. Hofstadter and Penrose also want to teach and stimulate the reader, but like Musser, they also have something they want to sell. Hofstadter will try to convince you that you’re a computer and Penrose wants to convince you that his twistor theory is the way to unify the fields of physics. These books are successful only in so far as they are able to give the reader sufficient knowledge and confidence to think for herself or himself about the subject. In the preface to his book, Penrose says,

“The reader will find that I have not shied away from presenting mathematical formulae, despite dire warnings of the severe reduction in readership that this will entail. I have thought seriously about this question, and have come to the conclusion that what I have to say cannot reasonably be conveyed without a certain amount of mathematical notation and the exploration of genuine mathematical concepts.”

I have the feeling there are people out there who are eager to learn but they find themselves stuck between lay-works that explain nothing and college textbooks that are both boring and beyond their current level of understanding. I applaud authors to encourage us to understand the world better by imparting as accurately as they can what they think they know and I would implore publishers not to refrain from publishing these sorts of works.

[Carmel-by-the-Sea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Z mojej perspektywy jest kilka pytań o świat fizykalny, które warto i należy zadawać sobie okresowo przez całe życie i jednocześnie poszukiwać na nie odpowiedzi. Stąd nieodmiennie wracam do publikacji, które opisują te kilka fizycznych zagadek fundamentalnych, bo liczę, że znajdę jakieś uzupełnienie, nowe spojrzenia czy kolejną inspirację. Jednym z takich problemów jest sposób funkcjonowania rzeczywistości. Czy w naszym Wszechświecie jest realizowana natychmiastowa komunikacja między jego elementami, czyli czy istnieje NIELOKALNOŚĆ? Jeśli tak, to mogłoby to powodować sprzeczności - skutki poprzedzałyby przyczyny. Świat stałby się niepoznawalny przy użyciu logiki, byłby jedną wielką magią. W jaki sposób jabłko 'wie', że ma spadać w dół, jeśli pod nim jest Ziemia? Przecież te dwa ciała nie 'dotykają' się? Co to znaczy 'dotknięcie' dłonią stołu (chodzi o etap zanim nasze receptory pod liniami papilarnymi palca zaczną przesyłać sygnał)? Wiemy, że gdyby nagle zniknęło Słońce, to Ziemia 'nie wiedziałaby' o tym przez 499 sekund i dalej poruszałaby się po orbicie okołosłonecznej przez te ponad 8 minut. To jest z kolei LOKALNOŚĆ - poinformowanie obiektów separowalnych przestrzennie wymaga czasu.

George Musser, dziennikarz i fizyk z wykształcenia, w książce "Upiorne działanie na odległość" rozważył problemy lokalności/nielokalności i oddziaływania obiektów na siebie z perspektywy historycznej i współczesnych dociekań naukowców. Okazuje się, że XX wiek przyniósł w tym zagadnieniu mnóstwo radykalnie nowych spojrzeń, zaobserwowanych fascynujących zjawisk, które czasem wymykają się racjonalności, czasem skutkują przeformułowaniami rozumienia mechanizmów funkcjonowania świata. Ta książka, to podróż przez zdumiewający świat relacji, na których zbudowana jest nasza codzienność, i w którą chyba warto się udać.

Najbardziej niepokojące dla naszego rozumu i racjonalności są doświadczenia ze splątaniem kwantowym, którego istota jest prosta do zobrazowania:

W Warszawie naukowiec Q daje po monecie pani X i panu Y. X jedzie do Pekinu, Y Nowego Jorku (oboje są wtedy w odległości ok. 6900 km od Q). Następnie Q dzwoni z Warszawy do X i Y i jednocześnie wydaje im dyspozycje o wykonaniu rzutów swoich monet i zapisywanie wyników (orzeł lub reszka). Po tak inicjowanych seriach rzutów Q trzymuje od X i Y wyniki. Okazuje się, że jeśli u X-a jest reszka, to i u Y-a. Jeśli u Y-a mamy orła, u X-a też. Wyniki są zgodne, choć obydwoje nie wymieniali się informacjami.

Choć ten eksperyment jest uproszczony, oddaje ideę wersji kwantowego eksperymentu z fotonami (tu ich role grają monety). Wykonywane są od kilku dekad doświadczenia, z których wynika, że takie nielokalne zachowanie dwóch fotonów istnieje i zostało nazwany splataniem. Nie da się tego jednak wytłumaczyć klasycznie. Wciąż nie wiemy, w jaki sposób odległe przestrzennie fotony uzgadniają własne zachowanie w sposób natychmiastowy.

W książce ten efekt został przybliżony (str. 30-32, 155-157). W sumie niestety tylko początkowe 2/3 książki wydaje mi się ciekawe i dydaktycznie wartościowe, bo m.in. skupia się na wyjaśnieniu fenomenów świata kwantowego i jego rozbieżności ze światem przestrzeni oferowanym przez teorię względności. Musser opisał wielkie historyczne spory, które przybliżały badaczy do zrozumienia pojęcia sił (grawitacyjnych, elektromagnetycznych) i zasad działania pól. Przypomniał spory Einsteina z Bohrem w związku z interpretacją dziwnego świata kwantów (str. 142). Ciekawie pokazał, jak trudno dokonać postępu w rozumieniu mechanizmów budujących rzeczywistość, gdy obecne teorie fizyczne wydają się niezupełne, a my mamy tylko dostęp do struktur emergentnych wyższego poziomu (str. 174).

Jak wspomniałem, końcowe rozdziały książki są zdecydowanie słabsze. Ta część cierpi na syndrom ucieczki od poglądowości w kierunku prezentacji trudniejszych treści językiem współczesnych modeli skupionych na poszukiwaniu struktury pierwotniejszej od przestrzeni i czasu. Rozważania nad teorią strun, twistorów, macierzy czy pętlową grawitacją nie zbudują w głowie zaciekawionego fizyką współczesną laika nic pozytywnego (str. 195-250). Raczej się zagubi, czy wręcz zniechęci. Dodatkowo autor zastosował nieumyślnie pułapkę polegającą na tym, że w różnych przykładach opisujących realizacje lokalności/nielokalności miał faktycznie na myśli różne ich typy. Propagacja zaburzeń z prędkością poniżej granicznej prędkości światła mieści się w modelu lokalnym, natomiast wymyka się takiemu opisowi efekt splątania. Liczyłem na dokładniejsze przeanalizowanie istoty tej właśnie niespójności.

"Upiorne działanie na odległość" okazało się książką nierówną i chyba ze zmarnowanym potencjałem bardzo ciekawego tematu. Skupienie się na intuicyjnych i dość prostych konsekwencjach opisu czasu i przestrzeni czy pojęciu pola, wystarczyłoby do uzmysłowienia kilku ‘cudów natury’. Autor chyba chciał opisać zbyt dużo i z przesadnie wyeksponowaną filozoficzną interpretacją, szczególnie w końcówce pracy. Zagubił przy tym podstawowe przesłanie, które powinno prowadzić do tłumaczenia czym jest oddziaływanie i czemu wciąż mamy z nim problem.

Zachęcam do lektury pierwszych 2/3 książki. Tam jest sporo wartościowych i fascynujących spostrzeżeń, których nie pozna się na lekcjach fizyki w szkole, choć powinno. Lepszą część oceniam na 8, gorszą na 4. Stąd wyszła końcowa średnia arytmetyczna.

DOBRA - 6.5/10

[Zardoz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ah, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Gravity, and Field Theory all get discussed here while exploring the phenomenon of Quantum Entanglement.
This isn’t some dumbed down Physicis book. Which is why I only understood about 70% of it. But, having said that I learned a good bit reading this one.

[Erik]

This book has a broader scope than I expected. After talking about the phenomenon of quantum entanglement of photons it broadens into a discussion of the idea of locality vs non-locality in the physical word. In short, locality is the concept that things can only interact if they come into contact. Non-locality, in layman's terms, is that objects can interact over distance with nothing in between. The arguments between locality and non-locality go back millenia. Phenomena like electromagnetism brought the question up centuries ago. It was believed at the time to be a non-local phenomenon, though now we understand it to be local and the effects propogate at the speed of light and are transmitted by photons.

For the most part the book is quite understandable, though at times the author goes deeply enough into particle physics that I felt I wasn't completely following.

The book does not address religion at all, but I being a religious person can't help but apply my world view to my understanding of the book. My big takeaway is that this book makes it very clear that there fundamental questions about the nature of reality, space, distance, time, etc. that have still not been satisfactorily answered. In such a situation, it really astounds me that so many people of a scientific bent feel that a belief in God in incompatible with a logical, scientific view of things. This book talks of theories that suggest that we don't even really understand how certain things arise that are fundamental to everything we experience — things such as the concept of distance and time. And gravity for that matter . . . does it arrive through exchange of the yet-to-be-discovered graviton, or is it caused by the warping of space time, and what does that even mean? With questions such as these unanswered, how can a person say that science leaves no room for God?

[Rama Rao · Rating 3 out of 5]

The enigma of quantum reality

The laws of quantum physics allow for two distant quantum objects (photons, electrons, quarks, etc.) to be entangled so that an action on one particle instantly affects the other, even if the two particles are separated by several billion light years. Einstein dismissed this as "spooky action at a distance", insisting that some hidden variables could be responsible for this action. He argued that physics is not magic but operates on the principle of local realism. Hence only nearby objects are influenced by each other like sun and the planets, as we understand from the equations of classical physics. However, Einstein has been proved wrong on numerous occasions in experimental quantum physics. Even black holes and the workings of gravity (curved spacetime in presence of matter) are manifestations of quantum entanglement at cosmic scales. The very nature of spacetime are questioned since it is no longer considered as an inert fabric of physical reality. In fact many physicists think that space is not continuous but exists in discrete quanta (tiny chunks) like matter, and spacetime could curve, rip, tear and repair and it can travel across the universe as waves (gravitational waves) at the speed of light. The physical reality is not simple at most fundamental level. Time becomes folded up with space into a malleable four-dimensional spacetime, and its passage depends on how fast you are moving, or the strength of the surrounding gravitational field. Yet of the four dimensions of space and time, time remains somehow special. If we know what's happening on a spot in Mars, then we can predict what will happen in that same space at a future time. But we cannot predict what is happening at a different spot at the same time. Quantum physics, reinforces this “special” view of time, but produces a picture at odds with relativity. Here, there is an objective "God's Eye" time that allows you to see all events encapsulated in spacetime, including the past and future, from outside the capsule. But while all quantum-mechanical things can be calculated about reality depend on experimental observations. Time itself is an unobservable parameter, so it cannot be calculated. It can't even be reliably measured: the principle of quantum uncertainty makes it impossible to distinguish the order of two events that are very close in time. "It gets harder to prevent effect preceding cause, because of “quantum fuzziness” of spacetime at quantum scales.

In this book, author George Musser discusses the nature of nonlocality, the “spooky action at a distance” from the point of physicists and cosmologists at the frontiers of current research. He discusses the nature of spacetime and the quantum reality. The universe is even more complicated if one is faced with the fact that only a small fraction of the universe is visible. The universe consists of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, 2.5% invisible matter and 2.5% visible matter. Laws of physics applies only to the 5% of the universe. The nature of dark matter and dark energy is currently unknown and also we don’t know how it interact with each other. Do they have energy, mass, frequency equations as we have for normal matter? And how do dark matter and dark energy interact with normal matter/energy? Constraints of special theory of relativity requires that nothing moves faster than light, including gravity, forces, information, matter or energy. And spacetime warp to accommodate speed of light. But space could expand faster than light. Moving clock tick (time) slower and moving ruler (space) appear shorter and hence there is no objective measure of space and time. Space and time look different for different observers in the universe. Motion warps spacetime and so does acceleration and gravity according to the equivalence principle of general relativity.

Physicists Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind redefine spacetime that is at the core of quantum reality. According to their conjecture, ER = EPR is that every pair of entangled particles (quantum physical phenomenon) is connected by a microscopic spacetime wormhole (relativistic phenomenon) so that large regions of spacetime emerge from the entanglement of more fundamental microscopic constituents of the universe. It also suggests that entangled objects, despite having long been viewed as having no physical connection to one another may indeed be connected in ways that are far less fantastical than we thought.

Some physicists working on black hole physics have suggested that we live in a holographic universe, which means the physical reality that makes up the 3-dimesional space (and time) is in fact stored on a 2-dimensional flat surface. This means everything we see and experience is an illusion. SpaceX founder Elon Musk, goes one-step further to say that we don’t actually exist physically, but we are a bunch of information (data) swirling around on someone's (?Gods) supercomputer. Musk is immersed in a technological world, and he is not too far off from the point of artificial intelligence (AI) and the world of super-computation. Despite the fact that this idea sounds extreme but theories about the universe being an illusion aren't new.

In spite of all calculations, conjectures and interpretations of experimental data, we could be looking at small section of one whole reality. We need a revolutionary like Einstein to rediscover the quantum nature of spacetime and gravity. In this book, the author does not offer a useful discussion of nonlocality, and in some pages he appears to be rambling.

[Anna Fuller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love a mind-bendy physics book, and I did love this one, but I feel like I needed a pre-read for the last 1/3 (chatGPT, we will be speaking shortly). Non-locality like the quantum coin phenomenon is so mind-boggling to me that it’s incredible we’ve known about it for so long. I left this book with:
1. A sense of confusion about pretty much everything post-Einstein (there is no space? there is no time?),
2. An impression that physicists also have been confused since post-Einstein, and
3. A desire to read a lot more about some of the current theories that Musser goes over in the last 1/3

[Giorgio · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a good book but, as mostly the physics books today, it does not bring anything new...
Sometimes I think modern physics stopped at the 70´s... the "news" are just "confirmations" of old predictions...
Nothing really new happens...
Higgs Boson, bleh... just an old prediction, nothing to improve the flawled the quantum field in any way...
So, my 3 stars is to Physics, not to the book... to new readers, it is a great introduction to the problems between gravity and quantum mechanics.

[Elen · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5

[Zach Mogensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not smart enough for this

[Lloyd Downey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've held off reviewing this book for ages.....mainly because it seemed so complex to review. Admittedly, I found parts of it extremely difficult to follow and that has contributed to my reluctant review. There are also a number of American colloquialisms that I had to guess at: eg. "Einstein blew off a lot of his classes"....was Einstein farting a lot in class or just missing a lot of classes?
Musser really focuses on the incompatibility of Bohr's descriptions with Einstein's. and "Like Einstein, Bell fretted that non locality defied the theory of relativity. Physicists can't give up quantum theory; it passes all experimental tests. For relativity to be wrong is equally unthinkable......Bell concluded 'We have an apparent incompatibility, at the deepest level, between the two fundamental pillars of contemporary theory". (Though most physicists didn't see the incompatibility or ignored it).
P9: Einstein "figured that that the world was in fact local and merely gave the impression of being non-local, and he sought a deeper mechanism whereby two particles can act in unison."
Quantum mechanics as expounded by Schrodinger proposed that ALL forms of energy and matter, not just light, can behave as both particle and wave. The Schrodinger equation does not describe a wave but a wave "function"....a curious mathematical abstraction that encodes the qualities of particles and systems of particles. The wave function is non-local.....even a single particle's wavefront spans the entire universe. Heisenberg...leaned towards a particle first theory and came up with his own set of equations. They proved to be mathematically equivalent to Schrodinger's.
Bohr's and Heisenbergs views evolved into the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation...that nature is essentially random and when a wave function collapses then a particle pops up in the "random" location.
Einstein objected to this interpretation....."The probability that THIS particle is found at a given point assumes an entirely peculiar mechanism of action at a distance, which prevents the wave continuously distributed in space from producing an action at two places". This action at a distance implies to my mind a contradiction with the postulates of relativity". To Einstein, the natural conclusion was that there wasn't any bubble that popped and left a particle behind. Bohr thought it enough that quantum mechanics provided "some mathematical methods which are adequate for the description of our experiments"...What more could anyone want?
Einstein responded with the famous EPR paper .......Bohr probably won the debate but a bit of a pyrrhic victory...really carried by Bohr's disciples.... and Einstein was only redeemed around 1989 by Arthur Fine's work. Musser is rather interesting about the "sociology of belief among physicists..."I began to realise that the failure to reach consensus is fascinating in its own right, a very human response to the depth of mysteries posed by quantum mechanics". Einstein posed the dilemma: quantum mechanics is either non-local or incomplete. Bell closed off the second possibility: he showed that not even incompleteness coud avoid non-locality
p132. Quantum field theory was the relativity-friendly, hence light-friendly, sequel to quantum mechanics. To develop it, Physicists in the 1920's and 1930's took two approaches, depending on whether they thought light is ultimately particle or wave. (Dirac, Feynman....were partial to particles....atoms can emit light by creating a photon and absorb light by destroying one. Classical electromagnetic waves are built up from "gobs" of photons......Pauli, gave primacy to waves...electromagnetic waves fill all the space around us......what we observe as particles are units of wave energy.
Both approaches seem to give the right answers but both left out gravity from quantum field theory. Both versions of the theory are "local".
p134. Hans Halvorson (a philosopher of physics) suggests that our world consists neither of particles nor of fields.....The particles that appear in the equations of quantum field theory are actually a type of wave. Such "particles" exist at no one location, but through the entire field, just as a note plucked on a guitar string ...spans the entire length...their only claim to the term "particle" is that they represent discrete chunks of energy and momentum.
On the other hand, "Quantum field theory specifies what a field does but not what it is."...."It definitely can't be an array of pixels".
Musser toys with various theories (which I just found confusing) about "super entanglement"...and "gravitational non-locality if space has a boundary"...without coming to any conclusions..... then morphs into a discussion of quantum gravity....giving some praise to Fotini Markopoulou's view that it must be a theory of the world ..not just the microword. He delves into theories of black holes ..without really drawing any conclusions relevant to the main story. And he delves into the idea that if a boundary and the volume of space are equivalent and can be collapsed .......then the boundary is the fundamental reality and the volume is derived from it; The "holographic principle".....p165. Musser trips lightly over the holographic principle with an aside about Juan Maldacena's paper about the duality of anti de Sitter (the interior of a higher dimensional ball)...like a bounded universe) and Conformal field Theory (meaning the surface of the ball). So, a realm governed by gravity (described by the general theory of relativity and its quantum elaboration) is equivalent to a realm governed only by non-gravitational forces (described by quantum field theory with gauge invariance). Maldacena's analysis therefore achieves the long-sought unification of these two branches physics. Though it seems to me that it begs the question whether space HAS a boundary. And Musser falls back on that rather lame excuse..."more research is needed".
p169. Spacetime is doomed: "Spacetime can't be fundamental," says the theorist Nima Arkani-hamed. "It has to come out of something more basic"......Nonlocality is no longer the mystery: it's the way things are, and locality becomes the puzzle.....And Musser attempts to synthesise these ideas about giving up on the space-time continuum. We can say that the world is ordered and space is a convenient notion for describing that order.
P173..Most attention has been given to space.........But time also plays a powerful organising role in the universe, and, as with space, this structure has two aspects...first it is hierarchical, (events can be closely related, distantly related etc. ..and second Time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things; made because all things are interconnected). He then looks at networks...like human networks as models of space; and matrix models with string theory. p190. Matrix models do have some peculiarities, but they establish a remarkable principle: a bunch of particles obeying quantum physics can organise themselves so that you'd swear they live and move within space, even if space wasn't in the original specification of the system. ..p192 "Quantum entanglement is the thing that is responsible for connecting up the spacetime into one piece (Mark van Raamsdonk);......"When we first encountered quantum entanglement, it seemed to transcend space. Today physicists think it might be what creates space" .
p194. Michael Heller advocates a concept called non commutative geometry, ...which takes a top-down view of physics, in which global structures...ones that span the entire universe ...are fundamental, and local geometric concepts such as "points" and "things" derive from those global structures, rather than the usual bottom up view in which the universe is built from zillions of localised things". "There are no points, no time instant". Heller says. Everything is global.
P195. Emergent-spacetime models also give us a new way to understand the big-bang. If space emerges from spaceless building blocks ...then the birth of the universes is no more inscrutable than the birth of a living creature. (I don't really follow his logic here; he talks of "matter and energy sloshing around the network, in a pre-bang epoch...and two galaxies on opposite sides of the sky separated by a gulf of space are unable to communicate with each other now. But at the dawn of time, there was no space and no gulf between them"......OK: but then there were no galaxies either). He mentions black holes without any conclusions that I could see. He suggests that spaces might even be nested like matryoshka dolls. But there are lots of criticisms about all these models which still work within the basic framework of quantum physics and general relativity. But , p200, "Notably the models presuppose time; they don't incorporate Leibnitz' and Mach's suggestion that time should emerge as surely as space does"..."Yet this separation of time and space runs counter to Einstein's great insight that the two are fundamentally inseparable".
p204. Heisenberg proposed to treat messy collisions as a black box: ....the s matrix. It worked well for a time but by the 1970's quantum field theory proved able to explain the nuclear forces the old-fashioned spatio-temporal way... and the s matrix was forgotten. Meanwhile Roger Penrose came up with the idea of twistors...built of light rays. The intersection of light rays gives you a point...a swirling pattern of light rays reproduces a spinning particle. Local structures in spacetime are encoded non-locally....but the idea didn't work..they didn't cast images in a mirror. However, a leading string theorist, Edward Witten, tried tying string theory and twistors together..and eventually a technique called "amplitudehedron" emerged. ..Basically you draw a polyhedron that captures the structure of a particle interaction....but so far it only works with highly idealised theories of nuclear forces.
A problem I have with all the above e "grab-bag" of theories that I don't know how seriously to take any of them. They all appear to have profound flaws yet Musser doesn't attempt to draw any conclusions..he just describes. I didn't find this very helpful. In fact, found it confusing and it made his book hard to follow.
p214...Musser seems to confound human relations and networks with space time networks. I think he takes the metaphor too far ...and essentially it become meaningless.
He concludes that "if it does turn out that space and time are the products of some deeper level of reality, who knows what new phenomena await our discovery ....dark matter and dark energy? faster than light travel?".
I was hoping for a more prescriptive ending. He runs us through masses of speculation ....seesm to give a slight thumbs up to string theory (though others have suggested it is a theory going nowhere and nothing can be falsified with string theory).
So in the end a bit disappointing. Three and a half stars from me.

[Mack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Between the nuggets are endless examples and explanations. I learned some new things, but only terminology and a few ideas. There is not the intellectual concentration of Carlo Rovelli. It’s a good read, though. Starts with an interpretation of physics history and then scatters through a wide variety of current ideas. John Gribbin has a much better review, here in GoodReads.

[John Jr. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Locality is the reach-out-and-touch-someone principle, the idea that, in order for one thing to affect another, something must reach across the distance between them—maybe an electrical signal, as in the case of telephones, maybe the force of gravity, as with Earth’s pull on a teacup you let slip. For most of us most of the time, the physical world works that way, but there are reasons to believe that locality isn’t a fundamental feature of the universe, that some things can be connected without anything passing between them. In this new book, published in November, science writer George Musser gives us a primer on nonlocality, exploring some fabulously bizarre issues in modern physics: quantum entanglement—the idea, repeatedly demonstrated, that what happens to a certain particle here can instantly affect one elsewhere, whether across the room or across the universe; a problem with black holes—the possibility that what gets into a black hole might reemerge later; and the cosmic horizon problem—why galaxies on opposite sides of the universe bear similarities though it seems they could never have been subjected to shared influences.

Though quantum entanglement will be familiar to anyone who keeps up with science news, these are knotty issues, and Spooky Action at a Distance—the title comes from a phrase of Einstein’s—doesn’t entirely untie them. Musser assumes a touch more knowledge on the part of readers than necessary. A few sentences recapping such things as the photoelectric effect or gauge fields would’ve helped. Similarly, Musser’s explanations of recent and current work sometimes left me scratching my head, though that may be the fault of my head. For instance, his account of the holographic principle and of theorist Juan Maldacena’s AdS/CFT proposal was less clear than others I’ve read. But explaining such concepts must be nearly as difficult as working with them, and for the most part Musser does it well.

An implication of the work discussed in this book is that space as we ordinarily think of it may not really exist. As Musser puts it in one of his chapter titles, spacetime is doomed; in the words of cosmologist Sean Carroll, “Space is totally overrated, whereas time is underappreciated.… I think that time is going to last.… Space, on the other hand—totally bogus.” However that plays out, in our macro world time still matters, and in one small way the text of this book has already fallen behind: a fascinating thing that the book suggests you can do on your own—obtain a graph of Facebook relationships via the Wolfram Alpha site—is no longer possible. But Musser’s use of it, as a prelude to his discussion of something amusingly called “quantum graphity,” is still illuminating.

On the whole, Spooky Action at a Distance is an enjoyable, surprisingly light, almost dancing survey of some profound scientific questions and their interplay with philosophical issues. Readers with a taste for the latter may enjoy seeing how Leibniz’s concept of monads, which I haven’t seen mentioned in ages, figures in. But science isn’t only a product; it’s also a process, and this book is partly a story of how, when, and sometimes whether particular scientists have engaged with the issue of nonlocality. Musser captures science in the forge, as it’s being made, by men and women who are struggling, with each other as much as with the concepts, to make sense of what seems to be a strange logical variety of nonsense. (For more on the social aspects of science as discussed in this book and others, see Adam Gopnik’s recent New Yorker article.)

The X-Files used to proclaim, in the title sequence of almost every episode, “The truth is out there,” a pithy double entendre suggesting both that the truth remains to be conclusively determined and that it’s pretty weird. As Musser makes clear in this book, the same can be said of nonlocality.

(Note: I read an advance proof but determined via Amazon’s Look Inside feature that the wording about the Facebook graph remains the same.)

[Forked Radish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Specific or factual errors (a few logical errors too) in opposition to theoretical or philosophical errors:
Preface:
1. The "coins" actually land on opposite sides i.e. complementarity, not "on the same side as its partner." But this is splitting hairs.
2. Colour doesn't correspond "to the size of a light wave" but to photonic frequency.
Chapter 1:
1. It's entanglement, not teleportation; although it's mostly semantics, it's not just a "quibble."
2. Polarization filters don't work based on a photon's "orientation" per se, but on a photon's spin and/or spin type i.e. left or right (it must spin to have poles viz. polarization).
3. "Polarizing filter" is a lazy layman's oxymoronic term for a polarization filter.
4. The polarization is acquired via the mirrors (it's why they're there), the "Polarizers" are actually polarization filters, the "Fiber optics" are the sensor parts of the detectors, and the actual fiber optics connect the nonintegrated detector assemblies (They are presumably separated for additional sensitivity). (see diagram 1.1)
5. An event horizon isn't "just a hypothetical point of no return."
6. "Faster than light motion across an event horizon" doesn't flout "the Einsteinian speed limit" because it's unobservable.
7. The "conga line" analogy is fatally flawed in that new ends are constantly forming, while the galaxies are already formed and moving apart with an absolute velocity.
8. Aristarchus of Samos originated the heliocentric model of the "universe" not Copernicus (it should be known as the Aristarchian Model of the Universe).
Chapter 2:
1. "Chemicals and electricity involved different types of nonlocal fluids and should not have been interconvertible." Is this a deliberate non-sequitur designed to highlight the illogic of Newtonianism? Identical things are ipso facto identical i.e. water is water. Only different things need to be "interconvertible" (convertible). Maybe, this is the source of such idiocy as electromagnetism? For if electricity and magnetism are convertible they must (ultimately?) be the same thing or at least related?
2. Interference patterns are linked to entanglement? That's news to me.
3. It's lines of iron filings not lines of "force."
4. "Fields" don't exist. This can easily be proven with a permanent magnet and a ______ ______.
5. "A space completely devoid of particles can still be humming (sic) with wave activity." Is this supposed to be a joke? It overturns quantum mechanics!
6. The time lag (hysteresis) between magnetism, electricity, and vice versa is c, because that's the universal default hysteresis and it doesn't even indicate, let alone prove, a medium.
7. "Fields contain energy" i.e. and not just the particles within the "fields," but the "fields" themselves. This is utterly unproven conjecture, magical nonsense, hypothetical horse 💩. Fields don't exist and, therefore, have no energy. This has been proven experimentally ad infinitum. . . . If it were true one could build a magnetically powered car, and perpetual motion via gravity would be routine. Funny stuff!
8. "Gravity always pulls"—I won't explain why this is wrong.
9. "If the electric field [meaning a flow of electrons, I presume] is focused to an infinitesimal point, it becomes infinitely strong." Wrong, it becomes infinitesimally weak. Someone doesn't understand electricity, nor Pauli's exclusion principle, since the preceding principle would stifle amperage.
Chapter 3:
1. But Newton's theory of gravity is complete, completely wrong, that is. It's Newton's gravitational constant that's incomplete.
2. WPD is "explained" in a way which is too ludicrous to lampoon. I'd like to explain how WPD actually works, but I can't (meaning I won't).
3. Non-locality or incompleteness which is right? Both are equally right because they're both completely wrong.
Chapter 4:
1. "Fundamental [What could be more fundamental than quantum mechanics?] physics—quantum mechanics—can't [or can?] be reconciled with common sense" That's because "common sense" is intuitive and if physics were intuitive, physicists would have to get real jobs.
2. They're entangled coins not "quantum coins."
3. "Laws of chance"? if chance had laws it wouldn't be chance. Maybe, it's the absence of laws or principles that result in chance, uncertainty, and randomness (actually a unity)?
4. FTL communication is possible as long as the ____ _______ _ __________.
5. How about first defining reality? Reality: the perception of mechanistic causation.
6. "Reverse causation" is still determinism, just left arrow determinism. Shouldn't it be anti- or counter- determinism?
7. The author thinks "scrambling" offers security. Welcome to 1925.
8. Seeking "a desired pattern of outcomes" is interposing an anthropic effect.
9. "Quantum particles" Oh, come on! All particles are quantum by nature, it's what quantum means! Maybe you should say entangled?
10. "Mathematically they [the quantum? waves] ripple through a higher-dimensional abstract plane [my italics], and do so at infinite speed." LOL! Is the author channeling Madame Blavatsky?
11. "Universes" is an oxymoron, just ask a third grader.
12. "Randomness in harmony"? Then order in cacophony? Paradoxicality in consistency?
13. "Holistic universe" is a tautology. Maybe that's why some avoid the term?
14. "Non-locality" will go away eventually, if you don't give up flushing. . . . Non-locality is like non-belief, there must be belief for there to be non-belief. Just so, there must be locality for there to be non-locality—Is there darkness without light? It's why knowledgeable physicists think in terms of "reference frames" ("local reference frame" is a tautology since all reference frames are local). For example: You, and I, and someone in Timbuctoo, all have reference frames and they are all local, but they are also all different. They are all both different and local (if things can be both different and local they can also be identical and non-local, it's called logic. Are all identical twins conjoined?), and that's because this is a ______ _______. Why is this incomprehensible to so many?
Chapter 5:
1. "Forces of nature" how quaintly archaic.
2. "Loop quantum gravity" Does is get any stupider? Non-local loop quantum gravity??
3. AdS/CFT should have been written out the first time it was referred to, or at least footnoted.
4. Atoms don't "destroy" photons, they absorb them by _____ ___ ___ ______. Do sponges destroy water?
5. "Microcausality"—like ants? Is there macrocausality too? Is the big bang an example of macrocausality? Doesn't anything ever end up on the ash heap?
6. Quantum means a discrete quantity, like a packet, which is synonymous with a particle e.g. a light quanta or photon. A "quantum field" is where quanta go to graze and frolic; maybe even, sire and calve (the strong and weak forces?).
7. "Physicists and philosophers" are agreeing, uh oh! That there are no "little billiard balls," then that mini billiard set on eBay is just a scam? I hope it's not too late to cancel my order.
8. Nature has it's own language? Is it Latin?
9. "Field entanglement" and "Superentanglement"—"Oh what a tangled web we weave" W.S. . . . Isn't entanglement monogamous? Isn't the fact that entanglement is monogamous the reason it can be used for impregnable security systems?
10. "A perfect vacuum"? Can this be serious? Good luck.
11. A Faraday cage?
12. There are only two kinds of polarization because there are only two kinds of photon spin i.e. left or right.
13. Of course electrons are going to be effected in a Faraday cage, why do you think candles were used in the first place? Duh!
14. By the "standard rules" of permanent magnetism nothing should and does happen, but by the "standard rules" of electromagnetism something certainly will and does happen (see above). . . . Is this another joke? It's an electro-magnet by golly! And the electric "force field" isn't "too little"—obviously.
15. "Earth's mass warps time." Can't argue with sound logic. But a few things are wrong with this statement: First, the earth has no mass*. Second, mass doesn't warp anything. Third, time is unwarpable. Why does the Earth have no mass? Because the Earth is a ______ (The Earth's mass is determined solely by its effects, but these effects are a priori to its "mass" which doesn't exist, since it's unprovable). Gravity warps, not mass, and time is the entropy of specific objects (there is no universal time), like clocks which are slowed not by gravity but by acceleration. Which gravity facilitates by moving objects into zones of higher acceleration, cum grano salis.
16. Hawking didn't "discover" anything, he only hypothesized.
Chapter 6:
1. Wrong. A single water molecule has a temperature. It can emit (an) infrared photon(s) and/or have random (usually but not necessarily) motion. If it does/has neither its temperature is 0 K.
2. Einstein's law of motion?!
3. "Superposition" foolishness makes it debut.
4. "Wisdom of crowds" aka the mob mentality? A crowd just averages extremes, it has no wisdom per se.
5. M-theory or "matrix theory" gets its name from the 1999 film, The Matrix.
6. Gravitons, the micro-goblins of physics, make their debut.
Conclusion:
1. Don't bother, it's just a droning Facebook ad.
* * * * * * * *
Concerning the answer to the "Spooky Action at a Distance" problem, it's perfectly simple, but you have to figure it out yourself, like a jigsaw puzzle, otherwise where's the fun? But here is the (censored) answer:
_______ _________ is ascendant vis-à-vis __________. Therefore, instantaneous action (over any distance) is absolutely necessary and would be paradoxical if it failed to occur.
*As demonstrated by Galileo in 1589.

[D Posey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but rambling.

[Waco Glennon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow!
Wow!

In 1894 Albert Michaelson, the first American to win a Nobel prize in the sciences, said the following:

While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established.

This was just a few years before Relativity and Quantum Mechanics would change everything. Within less than 100 years we would have built atomic weapons and power plants. We would develop cosmological theories that would attempt to explain the origins of the universe. It has been an entire century proving Michaelson wrong.

Musser now takes us on another ride down the wormhole. The book explains that the principle of locality (physics takes place in the close range, not at a distance) has gone in and out of favor over the millennia since the Greeks began their philosophical pursuits. Einstein was, in part, trying to show that gravity was not an action at a distance as Newton's theory seemed to show.

Musser does a great job detailing this history and bring us up to the current day. By the time we get to the end, even the concept of space is not sacred.

As is often the case with books like this, we are left with a "who knows what the final answer will be." Still, this is fascinating material. It is dense, but more than worth the effort.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A HISTORICAL SURVEY OF ENTANGLEMENT, NONLOCALITY, AND OTHER TOPICS

Journalist George Musser wrote in the Introduction to this 2015 book, “The world we experience possesses all the qualities of locality We have a strong sense of place and of the relations among places. We feel the pain of separation from those we love and the impotence of being too far away from something we want to affect. And yet quantum mechanics and other branches of physics now suggest that, at a deeper level, there may be no such thing as place and no such thing as distance. Physics experiments can bind the fate of two particles together, so that they … act in a coordinated way even though no force passes through the space between them. Those particles might zip off to opposite sides of the universe, and still they act in unison. These particles violate locality. They transcend space.” (Pg. 3-4)

He continues, “in the 1960s … [came] a new generation of physicists and philosophers … The experiments they did suggested that nonlocality was not a theoretical curiosity but a fact of life…. I practically had to stumble on the topic as a grad student. In the past twenty years, though, I’ve witnesses a remarkable evolution in attitudes. Nonlocality has surged into the currents of mainstream physics and swept far past the phenomenon that Einstein discovered… I have had the privilege of talking to scientists from a wide range of communities… Over and over, I heard some variant of: ‘Well, it’s weird, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself, but it looks like the world has just got to be nonlocal.’” (Pg. 10)

He states, “In deciding to explore nonlocality, I… soon found myself entangled… Some physicists thrill to the rebelliousness of questioning one of the oldest and deepest concepts in science. Others shudder at the madness. If locality fails, does it mean our universe is ultimately incomprehensible, as Einstein feared, or can physicists find some way for it to make sense?” (Pg. 12)

He recalls, “Is nonlocality just a carnival freak show…. Or does it belong on the center stage of physics? For most of the twentieth century, physicists treated it as a freak show, and as a student I adopted this attitude, too. It wasn’t until years later, when I delved into Time Maudlin’s book ‘Quantum Nonlocality and Relativity’ that I appreciated the depth of the mystery.” (Pg. 20)

He summarizes, “We’ve seen nonlocality pop up all over the place: n experiments on the quantum realm, in the paradoxes of black holes, in the grand structure of the universe, in the maelstrom of particle collisions. In all these examples, physics enters a twilight zone. Things can outrun light, cause and effect can be reversed’ distance can lose meaning; two objects may actually be one. The universe becomes spooky… Blown minds are an occupational hazard in physics… What’s interesting … is that this isn’t the first time that physicists and philosophers have encountered such mysteries. In many ways, the history of nonlocality is the history of physics itself.” (Pg. 42)

He observes, “You might think that if scientists quarrel over such a deep question as nonlocality, they might make a point of getting together and hashing it out. Yet the debate is remarkable for how little debating there really is…I began to realize that the serial failure to reach consensus is fascinating in its own right, a very human response to the depth of the mysteries posed by quantum mechanics. And even if the protagonists never shake hands, the debate can reach closure in other ways. As we’ll see, the opposing positions, lead us to very similar conclusions about the fundamental unreality of space. The differing attitudes toward quantum physics reflect the conflicting emotional impulses of science: to revel in mystery and to puncture foolishness… science is tranquility recollected in emotion: a struggle to think carefully in the swirl of passionate curiosity.” (Pg. 100-101)

He suggests, “general relativity allows spacetime to bend back on itself to create a tunnel, or wormhole, connecting two otherwise distant parts of the universe. The entrance of one would look like a doorway that leads you not to the next room, but anywhere else in the universe. You could step through to, say, Alpha Centauri, a journey that would take at least four years the long way. Astronomers have yet to discover any wormholes, and the type of matter needed to pry them open may not exist, but general relativity permits them, and any prediction of Einstein’s has to be taken as a live possibility. Strictly speaking, wormholes would fully respect the principle of locality. If you ducked through one, you’d follow a continuous path through spacetime, with no mysterious jumps, and at every point in your journey, you’d travel slower than light. All that would change would be the length of your journey.” (Pg. 149-150)

But later, he acknowledges, “wormholes seem like overkill. Anything that happens to enter a wormhole should come out the other side. Yet entangled particles are incapable of conveying a signal, let alone a spaceship. Any tunnel between them would have to be a collapsed mineshaft, providing just enough of a connection to make the particles give matching results in laboratory experiments, but not enough to open up a general-purpose passageway.” (Pg. 194)

He concludes, “And if it does turn out that space and time are the products of some deeper level of reality, who knows what new phenomena await our discovery? Could cosmic mysteries such as dark matter and dark energy signify the breakdown of space? Might there be conditions under which we could travel faster than light…? To me, these heady speculations pale beside a simple realization. If the ultimate constituents of the universe aren’t spatial, they have no size, and they can’t be probed by cracking matter into ever-smaller bits. They exist everywhere. They may well be right in front of our eyes and have gone unnoticed all this time. We may find the most exotic phenomena in the most prosaic places.” (Pg. 214)

This book will be of keen interest to those studying the history of speculative ideas within quantum physics.

[Donald Mosier · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to rate this book higher. It explores some very interesting topics. When discussing the effects of the several phenomenon, and the personalities of the investigators, the author does a wonderful job. But I have to question for whom he is writing this book. When talking about the mechanics of the various actions, the SCIENCE, he waters down the explanations as if his target audience is high school literature majors. And really, I doubt if any of those folks will ever read this book. I understand that the science is complicated. But anyone tackling this book should have SOME background in the topics and be able to understand a teeny tiny bit of math and some of the tough concepts. I kept arguing with myself whether I should continue reading for the summaries or to quit out of disgust for the lack of detail.

[Friedrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about quantum nonlocality. Even if you are a nonscientist like me, if you wonder much about entangled photons or subatomic particles and how they appear to communicate Information about their states instantly over vast distances without regard to the limit of the speed of light, you must begin to distrust the distance that appears to separate them and then to distrust that the particles are separate at all. Maybe you will begin to think they aren't two particles, but the same particle in two different places at once. You may think back to Firesign Theatre's timeless question, "how can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?", and realize that the question answers itself! You then read this book by George Musser and understand that you are NOT crazy.

[Layla · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book - my first by George Musser. I found his style both entertaining and informative which kept me hooked despite some really serious physics that might put some people off. He tackles the tentacles of the octopus that is quantum mechanics without shying away from the obvious conclusion: Quantum mechanics IS weird and counter-intuitive, and 'spooky' as Einstein famously said. But Musser's treatment of the topic is thorough, or as thorough as it can be in a book of this size and style. He weaves the different threads together to form a paradigm-shifting, mind-boggling view of reality that may challenge some of our deepest convictions of what reality actually is.

Highly recommended.

[Lara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super interesting look at quantum entanglement and nonlocality and the different theories that have been proposed to explain them. I like that for all the stuff we think we've figured out about how the world works there's a hell of a lot more that we haven't figured out at all yet! Musser definitely touts scientists working together, debating, and discussing their theories, rather than working in isolation, to spark new ideas. I'm certainly not expecting any definitive answers anytime soon, but the quest for those answers remains pretty fascinating!