Entanglement, Part 1
“Thoughts meander like a restless wind
Inside a letterbox . . . “ J. Lennon
The recent awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for their work on entangled photons validates the possibility of something beyond the standard model. It suggests a pathway into a new way of thinking. Such leaps—our home turf not flat but a sphere, a heliocentric solar system, natural selection, relativity, and now quantum mechanics, are always counter-intuitive, at first, until the communal mind is forced to expand to accommodate them.
Individual photons can be split into a pair of entangled photons, or a subatomic particle can decay into an entangled pair of new particles, and despite being separated, even by a long distance, they still behave as one particle, the understanding of one impossible without an understanding of the other, with simultaneous responses to each other without any apparent communication between them. It is a sustained connection—one entity, not two. It is as though the space we think see between them, for them, isn’t there.
I’m an English major, not a physicist, so I’ll leave the fine points to the experts and enjoy the mathless Big Picture, with a mind free to wander. I like to think about ideas like space and time being emergent qualities, local, not absolute. Dimensions of reality not existing in our conception of space. Transcending the speed of light. Instantaneous travel. The non-existence of objective reality. The primacy of love. Soulmates. Particles separated at birth (Big Bang) and now though galaxies apart, still a single entity.
I imagine that space, like time, exists when needed—when ideas become entities and movement—as in the unfolding of the universe itself: space and time not out there waiting, but being created with the expansion. I like to think of space as possibility—akin to thought.
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Many people in the world today are obsessed with aliens. Fabled aviator and ufologist John Lear, who died this past March, gave them much fuel for their flights of fancy: the moon manufactured in Jupiter and transported to its orbit around the earth 15,000 years ago, alien bases on and below the surface of the moon and Mars, Earth as a space prison where the prisoners must reach a higher level of consciousness, aliens conducting genetic experiments on humans, corroboration of the supposed goings-on at Area 51, and above all, a cover-up by NASA and the government who have long been aware of aliens in our midst.
What are “aliens”?
I enjoy good science fiction, but I’m not one of these voracious consumers of it, like my friend Perry Williams who in high school (probably still) could have built a small mountain from his collection of sci-fi paperbacks. I loved the covers of those books, those visual evocations of another place, but for me nothing between the covers ever lived up to the transcendence promised by the covers. Aliens were just humans in costume, usually with some exaggerated human characteristic. The fact is, John Lear and his colleagues notwithstanding, there are no aliens—at least I don’t know of any or know of anybody who does. We envision them as enhanced versions of ourselves, because ourselves are all we know—like a child imagining being an adult—they will get a few superficial things right, but the experience of being an adult will be (mercifully) beyond their reach. I’m not saying life, simple or advanced, does not exist elsewhere in the universe—personally I think if we don’t destroy ourselves (long shot) we will eventually discover that life is common in the cosmos, and there may be, probably are, advanced life forms elsewhere—I’m just echoing Fermi: where are they? Harebrained supposition won’t do it. I’m inclined to think that if aliens have the sophistication to be here, surely they have the sophistication not to crash in the New Mexico desert, subjecting themselves to autopsies. Those are human aliens. For me, we’re unlikely to have contact with real aliens because advanced civilizations are relatively rare out there and unlikely to be aware of each other during their, cosmologically speaking, brief existences, or because they don’t exist in the same dimension as we do. We’re on different frequencies, presumably having consciousness in common, but not in the same register. Maybe they “travel” faster than light not by Einsteinian warped spacetime, or wormholes, but by thought. They can be wherever they can visualize in their own particular fabric of reality, presumably somewhere they’ve had previous experience with, whatever the implications of that may be, or perhaps something like panpsychism is true: consciousness pervades the universe and two focal points of consciousness can be entangled and you can go from one to the other without traveling—none of which is science, but good fodder for science fiction.
“Aliens” serve two purposes for the modern human mind: they can stand in as an answer to The Question—how did we get here?—even if they answer nothing because how did they get there? Aliens also give us an “other”—and the human race craves an “other”—something bigger than us, something that certifies us, even if only for experimentation. It’s lonely clinging to this rock in the middle of nowhere and having no clue why. “Aliens” are basically imaginary friends.
My own inclination is to believe that “the universe” is a conflation of subjective and objective. Not that there isn’t “something” there—but something that has no reality until it is received somehow, when whatever happens when two particles “know” each other, happens. Maybe “the universe” is not a material entity, but an infinite set of possibilities, one of which we are seeing, and perhaps not even all of us seeing the same thing. The human mind will never know what “it” is. Any “knowing” will just be another collapse into what we call reality. Local and temporal.
Fred will always “know” something different from you. Most human arguments are apples and oranges.
Maybe manifestation and perception are entangled.
Maybe a lot of things. The work of Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger knocks down barriers and gives us hope, like a surge of fresh air.
October 25, 2022