- COSMOS, Entanglement, and Implications for Materialism
- At COSM this week, author Louisa Gilder spoke about her book The Age of Entanglement, which explores the bizarre phenomenon of quantum entanglement, in which two particles become linked, sharing the same quantum state. But it gets a lot weirder because the distance between the two particles doesn’t affect their entangled behavior. Under entanglement, measuring a property of one particle determines the outcome of the measurement on the other particle. It’s been proposed that the correlation between entangled particles happens instantaneously — certainly faster than the speed of light. Einstein famously called this “spooky action at a distance.” This non-distance-related relationship is called “non-locality.” Initially, many scientists felt that non-locality or “action at a distance” was too spooky to be correct. They suggested that there were “hidden local variables” that cause particles to behave in the same manner, and quantum entanglement wasn’t actually a thing. If these hidden local variables were real, one could explain entanglement-like behavior deterministically, without there truly being some entangled relationship that arose regardless of the distance between two particles. This idea of hidden local variables was famously tested in 1972 in the Freedman–Clause experiment conducted at Berkeley, which proved that there was no pre-determined, local-variable-governed behavior in quantum particles. Quantum entanglement was genuine.
- Implications for Materialism
- But again, it gets weirder. Measuring the state of one particle in an entangled pair generally destroys the entanglement. All of this has implications for materialism.
- First, quantum mechanics shows that the old materialistic conception of a universe composed of billiard-ball-like particles bumping into one another is wrong. The famous wave-particle duality of matter/energy refutes that model, but certainly so does quantum entanglement, where particles separated by vast distances behave in the same manner through what appears to be an instantaneous link.
- Second, quantum entanglement shows that materialistic, mechanistic causation is insufficient, and you need to be open to deeper layers of reality and causality. These implications are precisely why materialistic scientists initially opposed the existence of entanglement and believed (wrongly) there were alternative “hidden local variable” explanations. Does this point to unseen dimensions or deeper realities, even immaterial ones?
- Some even suggest that quantum mechanics reveals that consciousness is a fundamental part of the fabric of reality, and conscious attention upon parts of nature has real effects on how the universe operates. Matter and energy are everywhere, but they aren’t everything. There is also a mind.
- Life Is Complicated
- Louisa Gilder would presumably agree. Commenting on entanglement, she remarked The world is so much more mysterious than what we just see.”
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An artist’s depiction of an inhabited Earth-like planet facing an imminent collision with a comet. The nighttime glows with city lights. (An artist’s depiction of an inhabited Earth-like planet facing an imminent collision with a comet.