What is Quantum Entanglement?
Monism, quantum mechanics, ancient philosophy, Middle Ages, Renaissance and Romanticism redux.
Quantum entanglement is a bizarre, counterintuitive phenomenon that explains how two subatomic particles can be intimately linked to each other even if separated by billions of light-years of space. Despite their vast separation, a change induced in one will affect the other.
In 1964, physicist John Bell posited that such changes can be induced and occur instantaneously, even if the particles are very far apart. Bell's Theorem is regarded as an important idea in modern physics, but it conflicts with other well-established principles of physics. For example, Albert Einstein (opens in new tab) had shown years before Bell proposed his theorem that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light (opens in new tab). Perplexed, Einstein famously described this entanglement phenomenon as "spooky action at a distance."
For more than 50 years, scientists around the world experimented with Bell's Theorem but were never able to fully test the theory. In 2015, however, three different research groups were able to perform substantive tests of Bell's Theorem, and all of them found support for the basic idea.
If Bell’s Theorem is correct it leads to an ancient idea: monism. Monism is a theory or doctrine that denies the existence of a distinction or duality in some sphere, such as that between matter and mind, or God and the world; moreover, monism as representative theologians in the Western heritage maintained the idea as the doctrine that only one Supreme Being exists.
Scientists have revived monism in the notion of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the science dealing with the behaviour of matter and light on the atomic and subatomic scale. It attempts to describe and account for the properties of molecules and atoms and their constituents—electrons, protons, neutrons, and other more esoteric particles such as quarks and gluons.
The fascinating aspect of quantum mechanics is that it is an echo of ancient ideas of theology with the result that current scientific thought seeks to find the foundations of reality but not grounded in space and time as contemporaries thought for a considerable amount of time. Scientists are exploring ancient through Romantic notions for the idea that space and time are illusions. The idea of monism has lurked throughout the Western tradition for centuries and in its new form quantum entanglement is revisited. Augustine might have considered whether Spinoza's monism could help in solving what for a Platonic dualist must have been the greatest Christian stumbling block: the doctrine of the Incarnation.
Maybe it was a mistake to quantize gravity, and space-time was lurking in quantum mechanics all along. For the future, rather than quantizing gravity, maybe we should try to gravitize quantum mechanics. Or, more accurately but less evocatively, find gravity inside quantum mechanics. Indeed, it seems that if quantum mechanics had been taken seriously from the beginning, if it had been understood as a theory that isn’t happening in space and time but within a more fundamental projector reality, many of the dead ends in the exploration of quantum gravity could have been avoided.
If we had approved the monistic implications of quantum mechanics—the heritage of a three-thousand-year-old philosophy that was embraced in antiquity, persecuted in the Middle Ages, revived in the Renaissance, and tampered with in Romanticism—rather than sticking to the influential quantum pioneer Niels Bohr’s pragmatic interpretation that reduced quantum mechanics to a tool, we would be further on the way to demystifying the foundations of reality.
