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Albert Einstein never liked quantum mechanics because its many predictions upset his idea of how the universe should operate. The thing he disliked most he called, "Spooky action at a distance." EinsteinŐs spookiness is today what we call nonlocality. In fact it was Einstein's abhorrence of the many strange features of quantum mechanics, that caused him in 1935 to get together with his buddies Boris Poldolsky and Nathan Rosen to publish the "EPR paper" listing their objections to this radical science, quantum mechanics. At the top of the list of their list of complaints was nonlocality. The EPR paper argued that "no real change" could take place in one system by the measurement of another distant system, as QM required. This caused an uproar for almost 30 years. Finally the controversy died down, as there seemed to be no way of resolving it so the physicists shoved off the problem on the mystics and philosophers. Things changed in 1964 when physicist John Bell at the CERN lab in Geneva mathematically proved an astounding theorem concerning nonlocality. At David Bohm's suggestion Bell had based his calculations on the measurement of states of polarization of photons of light. This amazing theorem showed that a test could verify QM's prediction. EinsteinŐs nonlocality objection was now testable. In 1982 Alain Aspect devised a test that proved the existence of quantum nonlocality. Einstein's objection had actually ended up strengthening Quantum Mechanics. These tests have been repeated many times since have been refined and made convincing beyond all doubt. In Aspect's test a pair of entangled photons were separated and sent off at the speed of light on fiber optic lines. They then changed the spin of one of the pair and when measured, it was shown to have instantaneously changed the spin of the other. This does not necessarily prove that signals travel faster than the speed of light but it did show Einstein's speed of light limit is irrelevant. Kafatos and Kafatou said "Nature shows us that our concept of reality, consisting of units that can be considered as separate from each other, is fundamentally wrong, and for this reason, BellŐs theorem may be the most profound discovery of science." As Encarta Encyclopedia puts it: "The strong correlations observed in these experiments suggest we may inhabit a non-local reality, meaning what happens here and now would depend on something far away in space, time, or both.Ó |