“In
1935 Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) wrote a remarkable paper which
in the last twenty years has become increasingly a center of
controversy. EPR showed, using the laws of quantum mechanics and
relativity, that it is possible to determine the momentum or position of
an electron without disturbing it if the electron is correlated with
another electron. ‘Correlation’ means that the two electrons have passed
or originated close to each other and have affected one another through
electromagnetic interaction, although they may in the future have moved
arbitrarily far from each other. Another one of the pioneers in the new
physics, David Bohm, was later able to show that the EPR paradox
applies to other quantum objects, such as photons and neutrons.
Therefore, sometimes Bohm’s name is added to the EPR paradox and it is
called the EPRB paradox. In Bohm’s terminology, a quantum object is any
object whose mass is sufficiently small that it will be significantly
affected by the quantum potential.
Quantum mechanics predicts that we cannot measure the position or
momentum of a quantum object without disturbing it. EPRB predicts that
if we have two quantum objects which have at some time in the past been
correlated in a special way in accordance with quantum theory, e.g., by
originating at a common source, and which have up to the present not
been disturbed even though one might have moved to the moon and the
other to Mars, we can precisely and instantaneously
measure the position or momentum of the object on Mars by measuring the
position or momentum of the object on the moon. The object on the moon
is disturbed by the measurement, but not the object on Mars, unless
relativity is violated and information is transmitted to the object on
Mars much faster than the speed of light. At first, this does not seem
so astounding. However, the implications are very deep.
One of the fundamental postulates of quantum mechanics is that
quantum objects have a probability distribution of the states (includes
positions) in which they can be. Until we observe them they are in none
of those states, but potentially in all of them. This is taken to be
literally true. It is not that the quantum object is in a
particular state, and that we do not know what it is until we find out
what it is: it is literally not in any of the states until it
is observed. Very complex experiments have shown this to be true. A
bizarre consequence of this is that quantum objects can be seen either
as waves or as particles depending on how we observe them, but not as
both simultaneously (Bohr’s
principle of complementarity). For this reason some physicists,
starting with mathematical genius John von Neumann and Nobelist Eugene
Wigner, have proposed that the nature and behavior of a quantum object
are determined by human consciousness. There is no absolute separation
between the observer and the object observed.
Starting in 1964 a remarkable young physicist, John Stewart Bell,
showed that if the EPRB paradox turned out to be true, then the hidden
variables which Einstein had been looking for were ‘nonlocal.’ The concept of ‘locality’
is that of things tied together by time and space and subject to the
speed of light for interactions. When we communicate by radio waves, for
example, that is a local phenomenon that propagates at the speed of
light even if we are on earth communicating with a satellite near
Uranus. Nonlocal interactions can occur simultaneously over vast
distances, contrary to relativity, which says information cannot be
transferred at speeds higher than the speed of light. It may also be
possible to have the causes occur after the effects. Nonlocality is far
more bizarre than the hidden variables subject to relativistic laws that
either Einstein or his antagonists imagined. Einstein believed all
interactions were local. Bohr and the Copenhagen school resolved the
paradox by stating that the correlated particles would both be disturbed
instantly by a measurement on one of them. This is in fact what has
been shown to happen.
Starting with a series of experiments
performed by Alain Aspect and his colleagues in France in 1982, there is
now very strong, objective, experimental evidence that there are
nonlocal, hidden variables at work in the EPRB, which turned out as EPRB predicted, but not how they predicted. Einstein would have been even more shocked by the
notion of nonlocal, hidden variables than he was by the basic
nondeterminism of quantum mechanics, although not as spiritually
disturbed once he found out the implications of the nonlocal
interactions of the human mind and the local universe. A better way of
seeing the situation is that both Einstein and Bohr were right and both
were wrong. Quantum Mechanics correctly describes the universe as an
integrated whole, but there are nonlocal hidden variables tied to
consciousness at work in all quantum phenomena.
One interpretation of the data – and there are other interpretations –
is that when one quantum object of a correlated pair is observed, what
is happening is that there is an instantaneous, synchronized
communication of this information to anyone who would observe the second
quantum object, so that the two observations would be correlated as
expected; or if there is only one observer, his one observation makes
the probability state wave collapse for all correlated objects
simultaneously so that all observations will remain correlated even if
they are all made by the one observer at different levels. In other
words the communication is not between the correlated quantum objects,
which are subject to the laws of relativity, but instantaneously and
nonlocally (outside of our time and space) between the observers or
potential observers of the quantum objects. The exchange of quantum
information mind-to-mind or between one mind and all quantum objects is
not subject to relativity, the speed of light, or time-bound causality.
It is a type of telepathy, but of a special kind: namely, it is
unconscious when it occurs, and it works only for quantum phenomena. The
hidden variables are in a special quantum space which incorporates our
individual consciousness. Furthermore, this quantum space exists outside
of the time and space of our universe, and the transfer of information
can occur instantaneously within this space. When this occurs it can
alter objective reality in our universe. Corollaries: (1) A single
thought can have the power to change the entire physical universe; (2)
language is, in part, a quantum phenomenon. Additional experimental
evidence supports this interpretation of the EPRB experiments.”
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