Spooky at a distance

On my walks I always love slapping my foot on a good puddle. I'll even walk across the street for a fresh and lightly frozen one. But yesterday when I flapped my foot down, I fell right through. 

It wasn't a real puddle, but a similarly reflective and shimmery thing, a PBS documentary about Einstein. I had turned it on for fluffy entertainment while my body rowed the ergometer - which the documentary was, until I rowed into the puddle at the end.

That's where a Swedish physicist explained what "spooky action at a distance" - which the documentary goes to great lengths to validate - implies about the grand design of our world. That is, the world as we know it doesn't really exist, any more than when you're watching Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta himself is dancing across your living room wall.

Making this revelation even more startling, the Swedish guy actually looked like me. Really. When he went on about our world being a reflection of infinitely distant but entangled quantum particles, it was as though I was hearing it from myself!  This seems strangely appropriate in retrospect, given what he was saying about the nature of reality.

I find it remarkable to hear from a conventional physicist that our universe is nothing but a reflection of infinitely distant invisible objects. I have no problem with reflections as an analogy, (or shadows - think Plato's man in the cave) or as a figure of religious expression.  But as a literal description of everything I have ever experienced? Wow, that’s a leap off the deep end. 

That wasn’t a puddle I stepped into; it was a black hole.