Fabric of the Cosmos: I

As I made out my Christmas list a month or so ago, I put multiple books dealing with mathematical subjects, such as “Zero: A Dangerous Biography”, the histories of various numbers, such as e, pi, phi, and i, books by Stephen Hawking, and others dealing with physics in general. One particular book that I received was “The Fabric of the Cosmos”, by Brian Greene, the same author who wrote “The Elegant Universe”. Out of the thirteen books that I was blessed with, I decided to start with this one.

Currently, I’m about one-fifth the way through it, and my mind is well near boggled. I’m quite ashamed of it, but I didn’t know that much about quantum before starting the book. Now, as Greene describes the non-locality (which is the main subject of this post, that I will get to in a second), I’m really starting to understand how deep all of this is.

Non-locality

Greene describes a scenario where two similar particles are ejected dually from a single origin, and because they (let’s call them photons) both came from the same point, the two photons both have similar position, and similar velocity. However, in order to measure the velocity of the two particles, you would have to compromise the knowledge of its velocity for its position, and its position for its velocity, at that particular instance of time. This is so because when measuring one attribute, the particle is changed so that the other changes.

Now, say that you decide to measure the velocity of one particle, and the position of the other! Ingenious! Neither the velocity or the position will be compromised because they are two different particles!

Surprisingly, each time the experiment was performed (and cutting to the chase), each particle was affected by the others actions. When the machines detected the velocity and the position of each, the waves that were bounced off of the photons affected not only the particle it hit, but the pair of them.

When I read this, I was pretty amazed. Einstein and a number of other physicists had thought that this non-locality was impossible, and they were proven wrong! And not even by theory, or math, or logic, it was by experiment!

This brings a whole new world into our dimension. The principles of locality do not allow interference between particles (or anything for that matter) across space. There must be some sort of physical contact between them, and this proves that otherwise. The possibilities of the future technology that this could bring is unfathomable: Data transfer faster than the speed of light, mapping out of universe, no longer having to the travel across light-years of stars; We, as humans traveling faster than the speed of light, perhaps even teleporting, not caring what is traveled through.

I plan on continuing to write about this book and the amazing physics in it, as I read, so please, stay in tune!