We have so much yet to learn about how God’s creation works. And often, what we think we know about it turns out to be incomplete or even flat-out wrong. A story in today’s Wall Street Journal illustrates these truisms once again. Science columnist Sharon Begley reports ($) about “entanglement,” a quantum phenomenon once mocked by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance,” but which is increasingly supported by laboratory evidence:
The crystals in Paul Kwiat’s physics lab have none of the sparkling facets and points that New Agers believe heal the body and “enhance the life force.” But his chunks of beta-barium borate do something even more magical.
The crystals produce special particles of light that, no matter how far apart they ever travel, will always have an eerie connection to one another across the vastest reaches of time and space.
If a scientist makes a measurement on one particle, the other will “feel” it instantaneously.
Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance,” and the very idea gave him fits.
But in the 70 years since the great man insisted that spooky action had to be wrong, and dreamed up thought experiments to disprove it, evidence for it has gotten only stronger.
Sharon Begley, “Even Scientists Marvel at ‘Spooky’ Behavior of Separated Objects,” WSJ, Oct. 14, 2005, at B1. (Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)
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