1. Prof Kaku on a Discovery programme the other night illustrated "quantum entanglement" in a hilarious way. Take two hotdogs, one with mustard and the other with ketchup. If the two hotdogs interact with other, say they touch, then quantum mechanics says that before you bite into one of the hotdogs, mustard and ketchup is mixed up in both hotdogs, and only when you bite into one ("ah, that's a good mustard dog") that the ketchup dog is absolutely determined. This works vice versa. This also works if the hotdogs are separated in distance as far as the length of the entire universe. This sounds crazy and Einstein called this quantum phenomenon, "spooky action at a distance" because it was and is totally inexplicable.
2. I have been thinking about quantum mechanics and entanglement for about 40 years. It is by far the most accurate physical theory we have. So, I wonder what it means. What kinds of adjustments do we need to make, if any, to our everyday world view if we take quantum mechanics really seriously. There are a bunch of academics working on this in philosophy, maths and physics departments, and their thought experiments are like virtuoso performances which unfortunately are left in manuscript notation and never heard by general audiences. So, popularisers like Prof Kaku may need to resort to slapstick to get certain images across. Here's one image where mathematical wizardy is probably of no use: the concept of time.
3. You know the saying, "Time is God's way of making sure everything doesn't happen at once." Try the following thought experiment. Divide the visible universe in half. Since both halves are touching, they are entangled and therefore, whatever happens in one-half instantaneously affects the other half. Now imagine iterating the form of this argument ALL THE WAY DOWN so the entirety of the visible universe is parsed into oh so many compartments of say Planck's size (for physicists age 7, this is a trivial calculation for the visible universe, but for the entire universe, we just don't know its size over the light speed horizon.) For all intents and purposes, the entire visible universe would be mapped in what physicists call "configuration space" and the evolution of one possible universe through time would be a point moving along this fantastically complex space. Fortunately, we see this possible universe and can map any "rigid body" in this so-called "metric." OK, so far? The following is my killer point.
3. If we take quantum mechanics seriously throughout the thought experiment, then what happens to time? Thermodynamics tells us time is an arrow (non-Abelian) so that dis-order of any observable pattern is greater by any increment of time. But quantum mechanics is telling us something different about the universe. Maybe one way of putting this is to say information about anything and everything in the universe is timelessly preserved at the very edge of the universe. Nuts? If you are curious, you might dip into Leonard Susskind's Black Hole Wars, see:http://www.amazon.com/Black-Hole-War-Stephen-Mechanics/dp/0316016403. It's a very readable and fun book, and the good professor shows us how and why all the information in the universe is plastered onto the surface at the edge of the universe. I wish it were true. Imagine voyaging to the EDGE.
4. But my own intuition about time comes from the Aristotelian and Scholastic thought experiment in 2 above. I don't think you have to go to any distant edge but indeed, if we take the division argument seriously, it is not entirely objectionable that the connection to everything is right here and now. Time is annihilated in n-entanglement, another beautiful word for love.
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