Quantum Entanglement

“Okay,” I said as I picked up the whiteboard marker. “The delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment — tick for reality and consciousness are the same thing. Now that I’ve fucked with your perception of time, I’m going to fuck with your perception of space.”

“Like, outer space?” Zac asked as he sat down on my bed again.

“No,” I replied. “Like, physical space. The three dimensions of space that we experience in our reality. The idea of this and that, here and there.”

“Got it.”

“For this part, we’re going to look at quantum entanglement. Just a minute...”

I walked over to my dressing table, opened a drawer, and began rummaging through its contents — boxing hand wraps, a tattered passport, loose change in various currencies, a postcard from France, a yellow rubber ducky, an old journal.

“Aha!” I retrieved two dice, a tennis ball, and a permanent marker. “Come with me, Zachary.”

I walked out into the hallway and sat down on the rug. Zac sat next to me.

“Imagine, if you will, two magical dice.” I held up the two red dice in the palm of my hand. “Imagine that these dice will always add up to 7 whenever they land. So if I throw the first die” — I sent one of the dice spinning in the air. It tumbled onto the rug in front of us — “it will land on a number. In this case, the number is 4. If they both add up to 7, what is the value of the other die?”

“It’s 3,” Zac answered.

“Exactly! As soon as we observe one die, we know the value of the other die. They are entangled. Let’s try again.”

I threw both dice in the air, and they tumbled onto the rug. I placed one palm over each die so we couldn’t see their values. “I’m going to remove one hand. As soon as we observe this die, we will instantly know the value of the other die.” I removed my left hand.

“It’s a 6,” Zac said. “So the other die must be a 1.”

I removed my right hand, and there it was: a 1.

“Perfect. You’ve got it. Now, how is it possible that the moment I observe one die, the value of the other die is determined?”

“Maybe they are sending secret messages to each other,” Zac suggested. “Like, as soon as the first die decides its value, it sends a message to the second die. The message says, ‘I’m a 6 — over and out’. Then the second die knows it needs to be a 1, because 6 + 1 = 7.”

“Ah, but here’s the problem,” I said. “According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity-”

“His what?”

“His theory of special relativity. Don’t worry — we’ll look at relativity after entanglement. Relativity is the linchpin to this whole riddle.”

“Okay…”

“So according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. If the first die is sending a message to the second die, then there should be a delay while that information is transmitted. If I mail you a letter, you need to wait for that letter to reach you before you can read it, because the letter has to travel some distance through physical space. If you were to know the contents of my letter instantaneously, that would violate the theory of special relativity. Does that make sense?”

Zac nodded.

“But with our dice, there is no delay. Information is received instantaneously.”

“Oh…” Zac’s voice trailed off in thought.

“Okay, let’s do this. Go up to the end of the hallway and take one of these dice with you.” I held up the tennis ball. “We’ll use this to represent the speed of light.”

“Is that one of the tennis balls from a few years ago, when we rented out that tennis court with Bryce and Pandora and we were all like, ‘This is so much fun! Look at us being all normal and not just working on our businesses all weekend! Let’s do this every weekend like the hip twenty-somethings that we are!’ And then we never went back again…?”

“Yes. Yes, it is.” I sighed. “There are so many grand ambitions and long-forgotten dreams trapped inside this little yellow sphere. Anyway, I’m going to stay here with the first die. You’re going to go to the end of the hall with the second die. After I toss my die, I’ll write its value on the tennis ball and then throw it to you. As soon as you catch the tennis ball and read the number, you can then change the value of your die.”

“Roger that,” Zac said as he leaped up off the ground and ran the short distance to the end of the hallway.

“Ready?” I asked.

Zac gave me a salute.

“Rolling my die in three… two… one…” I threw my die in the air and watched it tumble to the ground. I then scrawled a 5 on the tennis ball and sent it hurtling towards Zac at the speed of light.

Zac caught the ball and yelled, “Your die is a 5! My die is a 2!” He ran back over to where I was sitting.

“Excellent!” I said. “But did you notice the delay in transmitting that information? Imagine that you were on the other side of the universe, and we did that experiment again. You’d have to wait years and years to receive the information, even if it was traveling at the speed of light.

That’s why these entangled dice are ‘spooky.’ You can separate them with any amount of space, and as soon as you know the value of one, you instantly know the value of the other. It’s like they are communicating instantaneously, which defies Einstein’s theory of special relativity because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

I’m using these dice as an analogy for entangled particles. This is precisely the same phenomenon that happens when two particles become entangled. When you observe one, you instantly know the polarization of the other particle. Einstein called this ‘spooky action at a distance’ and was really disturbed by it. But it’s not spooky at all, if-”

“-if reality and consciousness are the same thing!” Zac finished my sentence.

“Exactly!” I beamed. “But why?”

Zac grinned. “If reality and consciousness are the same thing, then space and time are an illusion and must be emerging from a lower dimension. It’s just like in a computer game, where there is no space or time. There is just an observer shifting through information in such a sequence that there appears to be space and time. And if everything is emerging from a lower dimension, like a codebase, then entanglement is perfectly plausible. At the level of the code, there is no space.”