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Excerpt: George Musser - Gizmodo

A New Way Of Thinking About Spacetime That Turns Everything Inside Out
One of the weirdest aspects of quantum mechanisms is entanglement, because two entangled particles affecting each other across vast distances seems to violate a fundamental principle of physics called locality: things that happen at a particular point in space can only influence the points closest to it. But what if locality — and space itself — is not so fundamental after all? Author George Musser explores the implications in his new book, Spooky Action at a Distance.

The assumption, made by nearly every physicist and philosopher from Democritus onward, is that space is the deepest level of physical reality. Just as the script of a play describes what actors do on a stage, but presupposes the stage, the laws of physics have traditionally taken the existence of space as a given. Today we know that the universe has more to it than things situated within space. Nonlocal phenomena leap out of space; they have no place in its confines. They hint at a level of reality deeper than space, where the concept of distance ceases to apply, where things that appear to lie far apart are actually nearby, or perhaps are the same thing manifested in more than one place, like multiple images of a single shard of kaleidoscopic glass.

When we think in terms of such a level, the connections between subatomic particles across a lab bench, between the inside and the outside of a black hole, and between opposite sides of the universe don’t seem so spooky anymore. Michael Heller, a physicist, philosopher, and priest at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Krakow, Poland, says: “If you agree that the fundamental level of physics is not local, everything is natural, because these two particles which are far apart from each other explore the same fundamental nonlocal level. For them, time and space don’t matter.” Only when you try to visualise these phenomena in terms of space — which is forgivable, because it’s hard for us to think in any other way — do they defy comprehension.

The idea of a deeper level seems natural because, after all, it is what physicists have always sought. Whenever they can’t fathom some aspect of our world, they assume they must not yet have gotten to the bottom of it all. They zoom in and look for the building blocks. How mysterious it is, for example, that liquid water can boil to steam or freeze to ice. Yet these transformations make perfect sense if liquid, vapour and solid are not elemental substances, but distinct forms of a single fundamental substance.

“Spacetime can’t be fundamental,” says the theorist Nima Arkani-Hamed. “It has to come out of something more basic.”

This thinking completely inverts physics. Nonlocality is no longer the mystery; it’s the way things really are, and locality becomes the puzzle. When we can no longer take space for granted, we have to explain what it is and how it arises, either on its own or in union with time.

When it comes to space, though, there can be no “smaller,” because size itself is a spatial concept. The building blocks cannot presume space if they are to explain it. They must have neither size nor location; they are everywhere, spanning the entire universe, and nowhere, impossible to point to. What would it mean for things not to have positions? Where would they be? “When we talk about emergent space-time, it must come out of some framework that is very far from what we’re familiar with,” Arkani-Hamed says.

Within Western philosophy, the realm beyond space has traditionally been considered a realm beyond physics — the plane of God’s existence in Christian theology. In the early eighteenth century, Gottfried Leibniz’s “monads” — which he imagined to be the primitive elements of the universe — existed, like God, outside space and time. His theory was a step toward emergent space-time, but it was still metaphysical, with only a vague connection to the world of concrete things. If physicists are to succeed in explaining space as emergent, they must adapt the concept of spacelessness as one of their own.


Note: Click Title Link for Complete Gizmodo Article by George Musser

Boing Boing Bulletin Board System

Comments ........................................
2015-11-14
00:07:15 UTC #13
daneel: Let's not forget that 43 people were killed in attacks in Beirut yesterday, too.
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2015-11-14
00:29:00 UTC #14
Conspiracy_Raven: The worst acts of violence to hit France since World War II? No. You are missing the Paris riots of 1961 where french police killed hundreds of algerians.

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2015-11-14
00:40:50 UTC #15
JonBristow: "The worst acts of [non-french-state-sponsored] violence to hit France since World War II" is I think what's implied here.

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2015-11-13
22:03:49 UTC #1
beschizza
Managing Editor
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Electric Literature: Engineering A Writing Career

Kurt Vonnegut’s Inspired Years Among the Scientists at General Electric
In 1973, Kurt Vonnegut was asked by an interviewer why he started writing science fiction. “I was working for General Electric at the time,” he replied, “right after World War II, and I saw a milling machine for cutting the rotors on jet engines, gas turbines.”

The machine was computer-operated, and it inspired Vonnegut to write a novel, Player Piano, about a future society in which industry has become completely automated, at enormous human cost.

“There was no avoiding [writing science fiction],” he told his interviewer, “since the General Electric Company was science fiction.”

Click Here For Complete New Republic Article by Evan Kindley