It's an Entangled world we live in!

All this stuff about God and Science and Creationists and Rationalists, has set me thinking for a while.  Science does not have all the answers.  In fact it looks a bit foolish in the eyes of some of these things from Wired, What We Don't Know.

 

My favourite is Entanglement, - How do entangled particles communicate?

In 1997, scientists separated a pair of entangled photons by shooting them through fiber-optic cables to two villages 6 miles apart. Tipping one into a particular quantum state forced the other into the opposite state less than five-trillionths of a second later, or nearly 7 million times faster than light could travel between the two. Of course, according to relativity, nothing travels faster than the speed of light - not even information between particles.

Even the best theories to explain how entanglement gets around this problem seem preposterous. One, for example, speculates that signals are shot back through time. Ultimately, the answer is bound to be unnerving.

Eh!! Two particles can communicate with each other at faster than the speed of light, over considerable distance!!  The first thing I would question is the experiment.  Is what was measured and observed accurate!!  If it is then how the hell do we explain entanglement.

And where does God come into this. Well for me, I'd rather place this stuff which is way out, in the realms of spirituality for the time being, rather than science, which looks to be struggling like a cornered Creationist, on this one.

Comments

[hugh macleod]

Great, great post. Thank you!

[Robin Capper]

I'd rather not know, and keep investigating, than invent a mythical answer based on faith. Not knowing is ok!

If there is a God and "we knew it all", would we be God?

[Chris L]

It only seems so "strange" or "foolish" because you believe so firmly in the limitation of the speed of light, which is a scientific construct! Put simply, this "spooky action at a distance" (as Einstein put it when he mocked the idea of quantum mechanics) is only because we assume that things which are very small act the same as things which are very large. It's been shown in many less strange ways that this isn't true (uncertainty, light through slits, etc) and no one has any problem with them...

Moving to myth as explanation because it seems strange to one's conventional understandings makes even less sense. Look how many things today a person of 50 or 100 or 200 years ago would think impossible, magic, or an act of god that we take for granted knowing that they only break the "rules" because our conception of the rules was so limited? This is no different...

Look at gravitation. We know there is gravitational force, we know that items act on each other because of their mass, but we don't know exactly how. Strictly speaking, this action at a distance is still inexplicable. We accept it only because we accept metaphors like heavy spheres on rubber mats with marbles rolling past, not because it makes any more "sense" -- quantum mechanics defy our senses, but that doesn't make them less logical or real, it just makes our senses limited.

I guess we could say that it's God or Ganesh responsible for these things which we don't understand, but it seems more reasonable to expand our frame, look at our assumption, and continue looking for the explanations and rules, knowing they aren't universal. It's worked pretty well so far for most everything else...

[Gareth Williams]

Yes, science has been struggling with quantum mechanics since the concepts were first proposed in 1900. Yet it hasnt prevented us from applying the concepts to further our technologies. Entanglement is an active area of experimental research. So resorting to "uh i dont understand it must be that magic dude in the next dimension" is a really lame bit of reasoning (akin to people thinking the human eye is evidence of a creator when - guess what - good old evolution and science provide a perfectly acceptable explaination)

There is no need to resort to this kind of pseudo-scientific psychobabble!

Best,
Gareth

[Clive For Nothing]

I agree with Hugh Macleod.

You ask where does God fit into this? I understand why you even think he does.

Just because we've not got the knowledge to explain something, it's madness to say it must be God (essentially, a mythical creature) doing wierd stuff. And then, presumably, making 'wooo whooOOoo' ghosty noises.

Cripes, we'd never persue any difficult to obtain science if we went with that.