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Word Gems
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Quantum Mechanics
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Virtual Reality: non-locality: as though all calculations were in the CPU, regardless of the location of the pixels on the screen
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from the website http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/argument/Argument4.pdf
Non-locality: As though all calculations were in the CPU, regardless of the location of the pixels on the screen.
A second key issue in quantum mechanics is the phenomenon of connectedness -- the ancient concept that all things are one -- because science has come increasingly to espouse theories that are uncannily related to this notion. In physics, this phenomenon is referred to as non-locality.
The essence of a local interaction is direct contact -- as basic as a punch in the nose. Body A affects body B locally when it either touches B or touches something else that touches B. A gear train is a typical local mechanism.
Motion passes from one gear wheel to another in an unbroken chain. Break the chain by taking out a single gear and the movement cannot continue. Without something there to mediate it, a local interaction cannot cross a gap.
On the other hand, the essence of non-locality is unmediated action-at-a-distance. A non-local interaction jumps from body A to body B without touching anything in between.
Voodoo injury is an example of a non-local interaction. When a voodoo practitioner sticks a pin in her doll, the distant target is (supposedly) instantly wounded, although nothing actually travels from doll to victim. Believers in voodoo claim that an action here causes an effect there; that’s all there is to it.
Without benefit of mediation, a non-local interaction effortlessly flashes across the void. Even "flashes across the void" is a bit misleading, because "flashing" implies movement, however quick, and "across" implies distance traveled, however empty.
In fact, non-locality simply does away with speed and distance, so that the cause and effect simply happen. Contrary to common sense or scientific sensibility, it appears that under certain circumstances an action here on earth can have immediate consequences across the world, or on another star, or clear across the universe.
There is no apparent transfer of energy at any speed, only an action here and a consequence there. Non-locality for certain quantum events was theorized in the 1930s as a result of the math. Many years were wasted (by Einstein, among others) arguing that such a result was absurd and could not happen regardless of what the math said.
In the 1960s, the theory was given a rigorous mathematical treatment by John S. Bell, who showed that if quantum effects were "local" they would result in one statistical distribution, and if "non-local" in another distribution.
In the 1970s and '80s, the phenomenon was demonstrated, based on Bell’s theorem, by the actual statistical distribution of experiments. For those die-hard skeptics who distrust statistical proofs, the phenomenon appears recently to have been demonstrated directly at the University of Innsbruck.
More than any of the bizarre quantum phenomena observed since 1900, the phenomenon of non-locality caused some serious thought to be given to the question, "What is reality?" The question had been nagging since the 1920s, when the Copenhagen school asserted, essentially, that our conception of reality had to stop with what we could observe; deeper than that we could not delve and, therefore, we could never determine experimentally why we observe what we observe.
The experimental proof of non-locality added nothing to this strange statement, but seemed to force the issue. The feeling was that if our side of the universe could affect the other side of the universe, then those two widely separated places must somehow be connected.
Alternative explanations necessarily involved signals traveling backward in time so that the effect "causes the cause," which seemed far too contrived for most scientists’ tastes. Accordingly, it was fair to ask whether apparent separations in space and time -- I’m in the living room, you’re in the den -- are fundamentally "real"; or whether, instead, they are somehow an illusion, masking a deeper reality in which all things are one, sitting right on top of each other, always connected one to another and to all.
This sounds suspiciously like mysticism, and the similarity of scientific and mystical concepts led to some attempts to import Eastern philosophy into Western science. [Gary] Zukav, in particular, wants desperately to find a direct connection between science and Buddhism, but he would concede that the link remains to be discovered.
Note that the experimental results had been predicted on the basis of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics, and not from any prior experiments. That is, the formal mathematical description of two quantum units in certain circumstances implied that their properties thereafter would be connected regardless of separation in space or time (just as x + 2 = 4 implies that x = 2). It then turned out that these properties are connected regardless of separation in space or time.
The experimentalists in the laboratory had confirmed that where the math can be manipulated to produce an absurd result, the matter and energy all around us obligingly will be found to behave in exactly that absurd manner. In the case of non-locality, the behavior is uncomfortably close to magic.
The computer analogy.
The non-locality which appears to be a basic feature of our world also finds an analogy in the same metaphor of a computer simulation. In terms of cosmology, the scientific question is, "How can two particles separated by half a universe be understood as connected such that they interact as though they were right on top of each other?"
If we analogize to a computer simulation, the question would be, "How can two pictures at the far corners of the screen be understood as connected such that the distance between them is irrelevant?"
In fact, the measured distance between any two pixels (dots) on the monitor’s display turns out to be entirely irrelevant, since both are merely the products of calculations carried out in the bowels of the computer as directed by the programming.
The pixels may be as widely separated as you like, but the programming generating them is forever embedded in the computer’s memory in such a way that -- again speaking quite literally -- the very concept of separation in space and time of the pixels has no meaning whatsoever for the stored information.
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