WHAT THE HECK IS A QUANTUM FANKLE?

In a 5 August 2020 article in BBC News, a team of Scottish-based scientists delved into the “spooky” nether that connects entangled quanta. The title of the article refers to a “quantum fankle.” Having never heard that word in my quantum lexicon, I ran it down to a Scottish word that means “entangled.” But what intrigued me was that its meaning goes well beyond entanglement falling into the realm of a muddle, implying to me the entanglement itself is, or at least has been up to now, quite inexplicable. Well, good word, “fankle,” because I believe that it reflects an important aspect of entanglement: one that goes beyond the bond and opens the door to how that bond or entanglement happens over distance, whether they’re Angstroms or light-years apart. As I said, there’s something important there.

Getting back to the article, the scientists are said to have managed to transport entangled particles through a complex media…”the entangled particles and the medium they travel through can be treated as one and the same…” Rather like a Bose-Einstein Condensate, I imagine. Or like a fold in space-time where the entangled particles act like they’re located so close to each other as to act like twin or at least coherent light waves, at the same time acting like identical particles. The “new” part of this announcement is that the medium separating two entangled particles is one and the same as the two entangled particles. So what is this medium? Is it part of normal space-time or separate and incidental to it? How does it exist within the reality of “normal” space-time? Is it more like a statistical electron cloud or an “aether” unique to the entangled particles? An Einsteinean gravitational field or a Quantum Vacuum? Whatever it is, it certainly is fankle.

I’m already thinking of how a quantum fankle might help elucidate the nature of the “soul,” one of the many cogent topics I have planned for the sequel to THE EDGE OF MADNESS (Aignos 2020) by Raymond Gaynor.

The Edge of Madness