Zoom: From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees: How Everything Moves (31 page)

Wineland used beryllium ions and a very high detector efficiency to observe a large enough number of events to seal the case. So this fantastic behavior is a fact. It’s real. But how can a material object instantly dictate how another must act or exist when the two are separated by large distances? Few physicists think that some previously unimagined interaction or force is responsible. Striving to understand, I asked Wineland what he believed, and he expressed an increasingly accepted conclusion.

“There really is some sort of spooky action at a distance.”

Of course, we both knew that this clarifies nothing.

So particles and photons—matter and energy—apparently transmit knowledge across the entire universe instantly. Light’s travel time is no longer the limit.

Some physicists say that this does not violate relativity because we cannot exploit this to send information faster than light, since the “sending” particle’s behavior is governed by chance and not controllable. Moreover, nothing of any mass is making the journey. Indeed, nothing weightless, even a photon, is making that infinite-speed journey, either. But something is being conveyed instantaneously.

The scientific (not to mention philosophical and metaphysical) implications are astounding. Let’s say some of the atoms in your body originally formed in an entangled manner with other particles soon after the big bang. Since then, both have been flying apart, and now they are separated by billions of light-years. Your atoms make up pieces of your brain, which is physically located in Peoria. Those other particles have become part of an alien on a planet in the fashionable Aldebaran system.

Right now, some creature there is observing your twin’s atoms in a lab. Bingo, they collapse to exhibit specific properties. Instantly, with no delay whatsoever, your own brain’s atoms know this is happening five billion light-years away, and they, too, collapse into complementary objects. The effect is sudden and alters your thought processes, and you make a snap decision. You show up at your boss’s party wearing an embarrassing polka-dot tuxedo. You can’t explain why you acted so oddly, but your life is ruined. This seems like science fiction, but EPR correlations are real.

First it means that the entire universe is a single entity in some fundamental way. It means there are no secrets between locations here and those far away, no matter how distant—and that the information “exchange” happens simultaneously, at infinite speed.

It means that Einstein was dead wrong about locality.

Locality is important in any exploration of motion. After all, movement always implies that things are pushed, propelled, or jostled by other objects or forces, such as wind, water, and gravity. This is what Einstein believed—that an object is influenced only by its immediate surroundings. It’s called the principle of locality.

A kind of supplementary principle is local realism. This means that all objects have actual properties independent of any measurement of them. An atom, or the moon, is really “there” in some location, and with a definite motion, regardless of whether people are observing it. It’s our job, if we’re so inclined, to set up ways to learn about this object and to measure its properties.

Contrast this with quantum theory, which denies locality. It insists that an atom can be influenced by events (such as its entangled twin’s wave function collapsing) that are not only utterly out of contact with it but on a different side of the universe. And that such influences occur instantaneously. No “carrier particle” is necessary to bring the news or effect the influence from one place to another, nor is the influence limited to some speed, even the speed of light. Instead it jumps in less than an eyeblink from distant empires.

As for local realism, quantum theory does away with that, too. Its popular Copenhagen interpretation insists that the entire universe is made of countless particles such as electrons that have no inherent location. Nor do they have any motion. In a real sense, they do not even enjoy any form of true existence. They instead dwell in a kind of blurry probability state of potentiality, with tendencies that are statistically decipherable. Upon observation, they materialize according to probability laws.

Einstein indeed hated this. It meant that nothing existed or moved unless observed. It also meant that no one could pin down the actual behavior of individual objects—we could only speak about them statistically as a group and assess the likelihood of them being here but not there or moving this way rather than that. This is what caused him to utter his famous antiquantum line, “God does not play dice.”

If we set up an apparatus that allows us to detect a particle’s location, the object obligingly materializes in a particular place. Yet it still doesn’t have a specific motion. But if we instead construct a device that can detect motion, we duly observe the entity to be moving, and yet its position at any given moment is blurry and poorly defined. We can’t precisely see its location and its motion.

At first scientists thought that this must be a result of some technological immaturity on our part—that if our equipment got better, we’d be able to pin down the motion and the location, the way we can with large bodies, such as Saturn. Eventually we came to see that the problem lies much deeper. The small entities that make up everything in the cosmos do not each have a location or a movement. Moreover, only our act of observation brings one or the other into existence.

The reason large macroscopic objects do appear to dwell in specific places and have motion is because they’re composed of so many countless small objects that the overwhelming probabilities of each yield a statistically certain collection in the spot we’re observing.

That statistical business is wild, too. While objects normally appear in the most likely places, there’s always a tiny statistical chance they’ll behave oddly. That they’ll materialize far from where they’re expected.

Consider a newly paved road with a fresh temporary covering of gravel. Passing cars cause each stone to jump into the air and land somewhere. There’s a fifty-fifty chance that a rock being popped up by a tire can go toward the road’s edge as opposed to bouncing toward the center. The ones that happen to go toward the edge now have a fifty-fifty chance of flying even farther toward the edge when they’re popped up by the next car. Over time, all these probabilities play out, and the road is totally clear of gravel. It’s all now entirely off the edge—because once a rock is removed from the road the game ends for that rock, which doesn’t move anymore. When enough tires have passed, even the pebbles that defied the odds and kept improbably bouncing back toward the center have finally yielded to a series of edge-oriented jumps. The proof is right there: a mere two weeks after the road opened to traffic, no gravel remains. Given enough time, all statistically possible events come to pass, even unlikely ones.

But look closely. Here is one rock that somehow caught the edge of a truck tire, was scraped by an adjacent stone in a very unlikely way, and was propelled hundreds of feet into someone’s bird feeder. This single act would probably not have been predicted. It was extremely unlikely. But it was possible. And given enough time, if there are enough objects involved, all possibilities, no matter how remote, come to pass.

In quantum theory’s Copenhagen interpretation, a milk container in your fridge contains particles whose locations are blurry and probabilistic. It’s made of many more atoms than the number of gravel stones on a road. (A one-gallon milk container contains the same number of atoms as there are lungfuls of air in Earth’s atmosphere.) When you next open the fridge, it is extremely likely that all the container’s atoms will be present and that the carton will be sitting where you placed it the night before. Even if one atom materializes somewhere else it would not affect the container’s existence on the same shelf as the one where you remember placing it. But it is possible, not impossible, that all the atoms will materialize in a most statistically unlikely location. If so, the container will be gone. Perhaps it will suddenly appear in a bedroom in Myanmar.

The chance of all those particles acting in unison in so statistically improbable a way is so small that it is unlikely to happen even in the five-billion-year bionic lifetime of the planet—the period from first bacteria to eventual sterilization. But the point is: it could happen. If it does, we see an apparent miracle. We have then observed motion without any apparent cause.

So this crazy stuff is true. The observer and the universe go together. And occasional impossible motion is not impossible after all.

Since quantum mechanical behavior and most of the motions discussed in this book involve random activity, it may be worth taking a moment to examine the power and limits of randomness. The usual clichéd example is the monkeys-and-typewriters thing. You’ve probably heard it: a million monkeys typing for a million years would eventually create the works of Shakespeare just by random chance. Is it true?

In 2003 a research team at a university in England placed a bunch of typewriters in front of a group of six macaques in a zoo enclosure for a month to see what would happen. The animals typed virtually nothing. Instead they pushed food and dirt into the keys, threw some of the machines on the ground, used them as toilets, and quickly rendered all the devices useless. They didn’t create any written wisdom whatsoever.

But random actions and probability theory remain a big part of the public’s “take” on natural motion. “Chance” is a key aspect of movement to which Aristotle and others gave careful attention. It supposedly has vast powers once it functions freely for long time periods.

So, seriously, could a million diligent, dedicated monkeys sitting at a million keyboards for a million years truly create the great works of literature, as is claimed? Believe it or not, such a problem is entirely solvable. Now, keyboards offer a lot of places to push; there are fifty-eight keys, even on old-fashioned typewriters. And 105 or so keys on most modern keyboards. When talking about random events, consider the difficulty of creating merely the fifteen opening letters and spaces of Moby-Dick: “Call me Ishmael.” How many random tries would be needed?

Given fifty-eight possible keys, the number of attempts would have to be 58 × 58 fifteen times over, which is three trillion trillion, before success could be expected. With a million never-sleeping monkeys working, all faultlessly typing sixty words a minute (so that typing fifteen keystrokes takes just four seconds), one of them would indeed eventually type “Call me Ishmael.”

But odds are it would take thirty-eight trillion years. Three thousand times the age of the universe.

So a million monkeys typing furiously would never even reproduce one book’s single short opening sentence. Bottom line: randomness has far less power to achieve results than is popularly imagined.

One other ultrafast superluminal phenomenon may also exist. This one is independent of Copenhagen. In theory, if and when the big bang created the observable universe, it could also have created a cosmos of tachyons—faster-than-light particles. At least it’s allowable by math and physics. That’s because, although nothing with any mass can ever reach light speed, there is a major escape clause. Namely, the speed limit only applies to objects being accelerated—objects that start off slower than light. For them, attaining 186,282 miles a second is a hopeless quest.

But what if, at the universe’s birth, there was a realm of objects that went faster than light from the get-go? These tachyons—whose name was coined only in 1967—are permitted by science. For them, the light-speed barrier remains, but they’re trapped on the other side. They can never slow down to light speed!

It takes just as much energy to slow down as to speed up. So tachyons would presumably grow heavier and have their time increasingly distorted as they tried to decelerate to light speed.

Like us, they could never cross that barrier. We could never see each other, since photons would never travel from them to us or vice versa. Thus any search for tachyons is a hunt for the invisible.

All this is mentioned only because a study of motion should include a consideration of the fastest conceivable objects. In theory, we should be able to detect the effects of tachyons; they ought to influence cosmic ray showers (also called air showers) and emit detectable blue Cerenkov radiation when they lose energy. Such studies have always come up empty. Few if any physicists believe they exist, even if they remain a sci-fi staple.

So we can probably cross tachyons off the list of things that move. It seems there will be no way to break the photon barrier. Faster than light is out.

Only infinity gets the nod.

CHAPTER 18: Sleepy Village in an Exploding Universe

Back Where It All Began

Up a lazy river, how happy we will be

Up a lazy river with me.

—HOAGY CARMICHAEL AND SIDNEY ARODIN, “LAZY RIVER” (1930)

The odyssey was over, and I was back in my repaired home. My never-changing village of two hundred people had not stirred while I was gone. Even the annoying, omnipresent, garden-destroying deer seemed the same, albeit with a few new fawns to carry on the tradition. China may be speedily changing, but you’d have to look long and hard to see anything very different in rural upstate New York during the past forty years I’ve lived here. Brenda at the post office smiled as she handed me a huge pile of mail, bundled with rubber bands.

My desk and its vicinity were littered with their own explosions of spiral-bound notebooks and loose papers and scribbled interviews. It was wrap-up time. I grabbed the phone to cross-examine the Carnegie Observatories astrophysicist who had promised me results from my night on that mountain in Chile so long ago.

He kept his word. Dan Kelson—still upbeat if a bit disheveled, thanks to his two small kids running around and around his office—was effusive with excitement. The four thousand galaxies he personally measured that night, along with his follow-up observations, had revealed places where cities of stars fly away from us at an impressive percentage of light speed. The measurements had carried him to the strange barrier beyond which humans can never see: the edges of the observable universe.