Spooky Action at a Distance Quotes

“laziness has its benefits. People trying to get away with doing less work are a force for innovation. Arkani-Hamed”
― George Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance: Why Space and Times Are Doomed—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

“Leibniz wrote letters as we write e-mails. Over his life he sent fifteen thousand letters to eleven hundred people. To this day, they have yet to be fully cataloged. And these weren’t tossed-off one-liners; many were extended essays that broke open whole new areas of science and mathematics. Like today’s frazzled e-mailers, Leibniz complained about information overload. “I cannot tell you how extraordinarily distracted and spread out I am,” he wrote to a friend.”
― George Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance: Why Space and Times Are Doomed—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

“I do absolutely think that the questions of quantum gravity need to be answered, but you can’t really pull an answer out of thin air … It’s the rest of my life. I’d really like to have some time to experiment a little bit.”
― George Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance: Why Space and Times Are Doomed—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

“For a sense of how weird the behavior of light seemed to Einstein, consider what he did to take a break from thinking about it: he invented general relativity. That’s like taking a break from Middle East peace negotiations to invent a cure for cancer.”
― George Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance: Why Space and Times Are Doomed—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

“It was weird enough to have a vegan butcher. Now physicists had a vegan butcher sorcerer. Neither”
― George Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance: Why Space and Times Are Doomed—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

“Indeed, the cluster doesn’t really have an “inside”—there is no volume of space where the D0-branes bustle around. Arguably there aren’t even any D0-branes anymore, either, because they surrender their individuality and become assimilated into the collective. If you look at a cluster from the outside, what you see isn’t the outer surface of a material thing, but the end of space; and if you poke your hand into the cluster, you will not reach into its interior, for the cluster has no interior. Instead, your hand will become assimilated, too (which can’t be good for it). If you wisely refrain from touching the cluster and instead throw particles into it, you will notice that the cluster’s storage capacity depends on its area rather than on its interior volume—again, for the simple reason that it doesn’t actually have an interior volume. Space has no meaning at this level.”
― George Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance: Why Space and Times Are Doomed—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

“We feel closer to those who are distant and farther from those who are close.”
― George Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance: Why Space and Times Are Doomed—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

“And if it does turn out that space and time are the products of some deeper level of reality, who knows what new phenomena await our discovery? Could cosmic mysteries such as dark matter and dark energy signify the breakdown of space? Might there be conditions under which we could travel faster than light (presumably in a way that forestalls paradoxes)? To me, these heady speculations pale beside a simple realization. If the ultimate constituents of the universe aren’t spatial, they have no size, and they can’t be probed by cracking matter into ever-smaller bits. They exist everywhere. They may well be right in front of our eyes and have gone unnoticed all this time. We may find the most exotic phenomena in the most prosaic places.”
― George Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance: Why Space and Times Are Doomed—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

“The world we experience possesses all the qualities of locality. We have a strong sense of place and of the relations among places. We feel the pain of separation from those we love and the impotence of being too far away from something we want to affect. And yet quantum mechanics and other branches of physics now suggest that, at a deeper level, there may be no such thing as place and no such thing as distance. Physics experiments can bind the fate of two particles together, so that they behave like a pair of magic coins: if you flip them, each will land on heads or tails—but always on the same side as its partner. They act in a coordinated way even though no force passes through the space between them. Those particles might zip off to opposite sides of the universe, and still they act in unison. These particles violate locality. They transcend space.”
― George Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance: Why Space and Times Are Doomed—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

“Newton’s force of gravity also acts instantaneously, but at least it weakens as you get farther away from an object, so it still has spatial qualities. Entanglement, though, not only operates instantaneously, but also loses none of its strength with distance.”
― George Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance: Why Space and Times Are Doomed—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

“Although Einstein said comprehensibility was a “miracle” we shall never understand, that didn’t stop him from trying. He spent his entire professional life articulating exactly what it is about the universe that makes it make sense, and his thinking set the course of modern physics.”
― George Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance: Why Space and Times Are Doomed—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

“Blown minds are occupational hazards of physics.”
― George Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything