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| Part of an entangled universe... |
One of the problems with string, and therefore by extrapolation* with Gordon's String Theory, is that left to its own devices, string tends to get tangled. Anyone who has ever gone lake fishing knows that while you are quietly being a boat potato, minding your own business and opening another beer, your fishing line is mysteriously tying itself into a big knot, so when the big one gets hooked you can reel in about seventeen feet of line and then...big tangle. Again! So after the appropriate amount of cursing, out comes the rarely-used filleting knife and away goes the fish, with that $1.99 spinner from Can Tire. Hence the homily 'Give a man a fish and you'll save him a day of untangling his line; teach him to fish and you can untangle the goddam thing yourself'.
Tangling is also a human phenomenon. Left to their own devices, humans will tangle as readily as any piece of string, sometimes in a friendly fashion to make more humans, or just for fun, but often not so, which explains war. Tangling as practiced by idiotic commercial fisherpersons on the high seas is why we can't have nice whales any more, amongst other creatures. However, we were talking about GST...which leads us to Entanglement Theory, today's topic. So if you pull one end of a piece of string that's just lying there doing nothing, the other end moves towards you, right? The opposite, pushing a piece of string, does not actually work, for some unknown reason. What you're really doing when you pull that string is you're pulling a bunch of atoms towards yourself that just happen to be lumped together and visible as string...but what if you just grabbed an atom and pulled IT towards you - would a bunch of invisible atoms follow along? Who knows? Just don't be trying this in public. But nevertheless, people who think about stuff like this (scientists), have devised ways to get 'particles' ** to more or less behave in ways that if you do something to one of them, a reaction occurs in a particle elsewhere in the universe because those particles are entangled, meaning they are somehow invisibly connected, like that invisible string you're trying to use to pull your beer along the bar (shortly before you get cut off). A lot of human tangling is, oddly enough, initiated in bars, although scientists have yet to study this to the extent to which it should be.
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| In theory, any action at any point in this 'tangle' will cause a reaction elsewhere |
To our right we have a model of the universe which fits all known laws of physics (not to mention our human sense of environmental aesthetics), which is clearly in a state of entanglement. What anybody can see is that if you push or pull or kick any part of this universe (or, at a quantum level, any 'particle'), something will happen almost instantaneously somewhere else in the tangle (but no faster than the speed of light, so you should be able to get out of the way). Regardless of what happens and where, however, the action and reaction will have occurred along a classical communication channel, or an observable physical pathway, even if it happens really fast. What quantum physicists are trying to figure out is how to be able to predict where, what and how the 'something else' would happen and, if possible, without the need for a classical communication channel. Actually they sort of know how, but the where and what and why are still elusive. BUT, and this is the big but, if they could figure this all out and predict where the entangled particles would react to something done elsewhere in the universe, they could in theory make something that happens on earth, or anywhere for that matter, generate an instantaneous reaction somewhere else in the universe. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, there are a lots of physical laws that prevent us from actually doing theoretical things. Right now with even the best entanglements and channels, nothing can happen faster than the speed of light, which is pretty slow if you want to send somebody you're entangled with to Alpha Centauri for a vacation, for example (about ten years to get there and back at almost the speed of light. I mean, lots can change in ten years, eh?). Although the theoretical beauty of entanglement is fascinating, so far it's mostly being used by computer applications for encrypted information. In science fiction, of course, it's the basic idea behind teleportation. It's also generating some interesting research in pure creativity and why we humans make various kinds of art. Here's a nice tune about entanglement:
* 'extrapolation' is one of my favourite words, as it can be used in the phrase 'by extrapolation' to suggest that something should be obvious to anyone with common sense, when it's not obvious at all!
** 'particle' is one of those words used by scientists to try to make things make sense. They aren't particles at all, at least not what normal people would call particles. Some particles are just theoretical, meaning they don't exist at all except in somebody's imagination. Somehow, some people get away with that kind of thinking, but lots don't. Artists do, sometimes, provided they actually do some work and don't just go around babbling about stuff in their imaginations.
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