03/06/2009
Scientific American, March 2009
An article in a popular science magazine that gives a history and modern understanding on quantum physics and its relation to the theory of special relativity. The screwiest thing about quantum physics is its 'nonlocality', meaning that particles manage to affect each other without being next to each other, that is, without being local and having no intervening physical connection between them. This spooky action at a distance is what Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen declared, in their EPR argument, was the reason that quantum physics is an incomplete theory, missing part of reality. Bohr responded instead that this part of reality is just plain murky, and that physics should give up its quest to give a complete and finalized picture of the universe. This reply underwrote much of the philosophical approach of physics until the 1990s, when accurate models of the quantum realm began to gain strength. The drawback was that it seemed that Einstein's theory of special relativity was being theoretically threatened. Authors pinpoint Tim Maudlin's 1994 book Quantum Nonlocality and Relativity as one of the strongest challengers: entanglement of particles seems to involve 'absolute simultaneity' of causal or informational transmission, which is incompatible with the impossibility of faster-than-light transmissions postulated by special relativity.
The new science tries either to repair these problems for the two theories or to keep the tension and jettison a third 'primordial' assumption, for instance, that there is an exact physical condition of the world at a certain time.
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