Meanwhile, quantum theory’s growing record of success in explaining chemical bonding and predicting new particles made Einstein’s qualms look merely “philosophical”-which can be a term of abuse in physics.Īnd so the matter stood until 1964, a little under a decade after Einstein’s death. Defenders of the quantum consensus, chief among them Niels Bohr, endeavored to rebut Einstein, yet they failed to appreciate the true force of his logic. (Einstein’s 1921 Nobel Prize was for his work on the photoelectric effect, a quantum phenomenon, not for his discovery of relativity.) He came up with clever thought-experiments to make the problem he saw vivid. It seemed to entail “spooky action at a distance.” He took this to mean that there must be something seriously amiss with the quantum theory, which he himself had helped create. “Unless one makes this kind of assumption,” Einstein said, “physical thinking in the familiar sense would not be possible.” He dismissed the possibility of voodoo-like, space-defying, nonlocal influences as “spooky action at a distance” ( spukhafte Fernwirkung).īut in the 1920s Einstein, alone among his contemporaries, noticed something disturbing: the new science of quantum mechanics looked to be at odds with the principle of locality. He couldn’t imagine how science could proceed without it. Nonlocality, by contrast, has always been the refuge of the occult and the hermetic, of believers in “sympathies” and “synchronicity” and “holism.”Īlbert Einstein had a deep philosophical faith in the principle of locality. The principle of locality promises to render the workings of nature rational and transparent, allowing complex phenomena to be “reduced” to local interactions. But in the nineteenth century Michael Faraday restored locality by introducing the concept of a “field” as an all-pervading, energy-carrying medium through which forces like gravity and electromagnetism are transmitted from one object to another-not instantaneously, as would be the case with nonlocal action, but at a fixed and finite speed: the speed of light. Newton (to his own distress) seemed to depart from it, since gravity in his theory was an attractive force that somehow reached across empty space, perhaps instantaneously. Aristotle adhered to the principle of locality so did Descartes. Whereas the gods were believed to be capable of acting nonlocally, by simply willing remote events to occur, genuine causality for the atomists was always local, a matter of hard little atoms bumping into one another. For the Greek atomists, it was what distinguished naturalistic explanations from magical ones. The idea of locality emerged early in the history of science. But I can’t affect you in a way that jumps instantly across the expanse of space that separates us, without anything traveling from me to you-by sticking a pin in a voodoo doll, say. I can affect you, for instance, by extending my arm and giving you a pat on the cheek, or by calling you on your cell phone (electromagnetic radiation), or even-very, very slightly-by wiggling my little finger (gravitational waves). It follows from the principle of locality that remote things can affect each other only indirectly, through causal intermediaries that bridge the distance between them. Aptly enough, physicists call this the “principle of locality.” What the principle of locality says, in essence, is that the world consists of separately existing physical objects, and that these objects can directly affect one another only if they come into contact. In physics, as in politics, there is a time-honored notion that all action is ultimately local. The Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, who in 1964 proposed a way to observe ‘spooky action’ of particles experimentally, at the Large Electron-Positron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, 1989
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