Horgan: Will the weirdness of quantum mechanics ever go away?

Gleiser: I don’t see how. It is by now clear that nonlocality is here to stay, the notion that quantum entanglement seems to defy space and time, as entangled particles behave as one at very large distances and faster than the speed of light. Also, quantum indeterminacy is fundamental, in that we cannot predict what value we will measure in a quantum system. I am happy to embrace the mystery of quantum mechanics without having to force reality into it, as some colleagues do by attributing reality to the wave function (ontology again!) at the expense of suggesting that every measurement creates a set of parallel universes so that all options are realized somewhere. When the solution to a mystery is even more mysterious we should be very careful… I see quantum mechanics as a powerful way to describe what we can measure of the world of the very small. Does it create an interpretation nightmare? Yes, it does. But it also reflects our very incomplete knowledge of the world, something that is not our enemy. Should we keep pushing forward? Of course! To me, the fundamental mystery is how the observer and the observed are tangled up, the issue of how measurements gives reality to a quantum object. We don’t know if the moon is there when we are not looking, but we assume it is. Assuming it’s there is not the same as knowing it is there. Science often forgets how experience is absolutely essential to everything we do. Perhaps that’s the missing link in quantum mechanics, understanding it as a narrative of the self interacting with the world.




Of all the strange aspects of quantum physics so far discovered, the strangest of all has to be the shocking discovery that the principle of relativistic causality is violated by quantum phenomena. Roughly speaking, if two particles interact and then separate, flying far apart from each other, they nevertheless may continue to share properties of a strange kind, that may be ascribed to the pair, without each of the individuals having themselves any definite properties. We say the two particles are “entangled.”

When two particles are in such an entangled state, an experimenter can, it turns out, affect the properties of one of the particles, directly and immediately, by choosing to measure some particular corresponding property of the other. It matters not at all that it would require a signal much faster than light to effect directly such an influence.

This has been shown in many experiments carried out since the 1970s, which test a notion of locality formulated by John Bell in 1964—and all the results show that entangled pairs violate that concept of locality.