Entanglement
Across a deliriously troubled week in the run-up to a manuscript submission, I took to the dope of the internet of quantum physics videos and graphics. A Yale Physics professor rues that physics PhDs are now mostly working in finance. My answer: maybe they looked into the slippery tunnels of black holes, felt a bit giddy, and figured that finance might be a bit more stable life option.
A physicist friend, over a very long car-drive in the US in 2024, had explained that if you split a photon and intervene in one part, the other part shows the exact same change instantaneously. (What is a photon? It is the elementary particle of light.) Okay, so, elementary particles of light seem to have souls or what? Two utterly connected, entangled entities. Fragments of a whole? But physicists would probably mock the very idea of a whole, a totality.
This is the stuff of cheap love songs. It’s like a coin in the air with both states of heads and tails at the same time. Even light years away, if one changes state, the other changes too, with no timelag whatsoever. Physicists say that quantum states are interdependent, entangled. [What is a ‘state’ in physics? I am not sure, but I would call it the consciousness of matter.] I heard my friend patiently in the car, nodding in order not to be found out as stupid. It is only last week that I began to understand the property of entanglement in quantum physics. One may begin here on Wikipedia. And then, listen here. And if you’re a bit trippy, the obvious metaphor will be that of consciousness (listen here). Is matter conscious then? Does it have intention, will, desire?
You might also go to this IG account and watch reels that do not have a shopping button. All matter collapses at some point, and the laws of physics are inapplicable, and these observable slices of the universe look breathtakingly beautiful.
Physics speaks of perfect, simultaneous, inexplicable correlations between entangled entities. The universe is ‘non-local’.
[Also Black Holes seem to erase information about the stuff that they emit, apparently, leaving no trace. Watch physicist Brian Cox speak about it here.]
Substack frequency standards may be sending me a cautionary note, but surely they can wait until my head stops spinning.