Good news from the previous century

I just got some good news. The conflict between quantum physics and relativity over who rules the world is that relativity supposedly doesn't allow for quantum entanglement. Maybe this is a problem for relativity, but it's not a problem for me. For starters, quantum entanglement happens, whether or not relativity allows it. For twosies, I wonder if this problem is a result of perhaps the greatest feat of human imagination suddenly becoming too rigid once it had some rules in place.

Okay, now I'll back up (I didn't want to keep you waiting for the good news). Quantum entanglement, as you may know, is the name for the connection between two subatomic particles that causes them to instantly react to changes in the other. By changes, I mean a change in their spin. I always took this to mean no more or less than the direction in which they are spinning, but in the book I'm reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson- very much up to the Bryson standard- he refers to it as a "property called spin" which made me think that perhaps there is more to it. Anyway, the more important word in that sentence for our purposes is instantly. Changes of subatomic particles in response to their partners (electrons are most commonly cited, but I think the same holds true for positrons and other little guys that they don't bother with in high school chemistry) may be the only thing in the universe that is truly instant.

A website might advertise that it responds instantly to changes in the weather, the score, the world, whatever, but what it means is that when a relevant piece of information changes, a person or a computer inputs the change, and then some more computer things happen, and pretty soon, the website reflects the change. Sometimes people say that a person reacted instantly, but what they mean is that a thing happened, and the person's senses processed it, and very soon after, for a human anyway, the person did something in response. A wrecking ball hitting a building damages it just as soon as the force transfers over to the building, which takes such a short amount of time, that you probably don't notice it, but time passes nonetheless.

Change the spin of an electron though, its quantum entangled sibling changes INSTANTLY. This ruffled more than a few feathers of the birds examining the world of the smallest (most notably that Einstein guy). The reason for the trouble is due to two- maybe three, but we'll get to that- assumptions. The first is that nothing no way no how can go faster than the speed of light. It's not just that our rockets aren't awesome enough yet, it's that our universe apparently has a speed limit. The second assumption is that the particles must be passing a message between them, but if that were true, the message can go faster than the speed of light (people did eventually get around to proving this with entangled particles that were miles apart).

Like I said, this is a problem for relativity, but not for me. Relativity is concerned with mechanics- what makes particles bounce and spin in just the way that they do- I am concerned with ideas. From what I understand, entanglement has not been explained so much as accepted. My feeling is that 1) you eventually have to get to that point when you are trying to explain the universe. It might even be a goal. 2) This one may be beyond our ability to explain mechanically, at least for now. Perhaps there are strings that connect the particles that are undetectable to us, or, and here's where my allegiances lie most comfortably, maybe we just need to get our heads around the idea that the two particles are better described as one thing.

Science is better built for reductionism than holism, even when it's just a tiny iota of holism. It's not a molecule, it's a bunch of atoms! It's not an atom, it's a nucleus with an electron cloud! It's not a nucleus, it's protons and neutrons, and it's not those either, it's a bunch of quarks! The word "molecule" is often more efficient than useful than something like "a set of atoms that are stuck together," but it wouldn't be considered more accurate. Describing things by group saves time, not precision.

In the case of entangled particles, perhaps "one entanglement" is more precise than "two electrons." Maybe there doesn't have to be a signal between the two electrons because you are not just changing one electron, you are changing one entanglement. You could argue that this is avoiding the problem by redrawing the lines so you can't see it, but I would counter that it's the previous set of lines that cause it. Finding new lines and improving on the old ones is pretty much what science is all about.

So why was it good news that the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and relativity is essentially the entanglement problem? Well, I'd heard a while ago that these two systems were incompatible, and that made me sad. I wanted everything with quantum mechanics to be okay, and if it conflicted with relativity, than it didn't mean it was wrong, it just meant that something was wrong. But like I may have mentioned, the entanglement problem is no problem of mine.

That meant I was free to love quantum mechanics without reservation, and I do really love quantum mechanics. My attitude toward the world has always been absurdist. This is a style, but it's also a position. Absurdity touches my soul more than rationality does. Rationality is about rules and decisions, and these give the world some structure, both in our minds and out of them, but on some level I always understood them to be arbitrary. Useful, functional, purposeful, helpful, whatever else-ful, but not capital-r Right.

Absurdity touched deeper for me, but rationality always seemed to win. In the end I just seemed to be discarding reality for Hamlet's nutshell, and I would often dead-end there not entirely sure how it happened.

So imagine my delight, when these headlines made it into my sphere of academia:
Science fact! Electrons can blip out of space in one place and back in somewhere else without occupying the space in between! Science fact! It is completely impossible to know both an electron's trajectory and location! You can only know one or the other, almost as if, they don't exist at the same time! Science fact! Measuring a particle can change it! Not the mechanics of the measurement, the fact that it was measured! THE FACT THAT IT WAS MEASURED!!! WHAT KIND OF UNIVERSE IS THIS!?!?!?!

I'm not going to try to unpack all of that right now, but learning it caused a delightful explosion of many of my fundamental assumptions about the world. It's one of science's greatest triumphs, and to me, it was a reminder that somehow absurdity always gets the last laugh.