by Cate Montana
WTB - For those fuzzy on quantum entanglement, could you give a brief overview of the relationship that you've written about in your new book Entangled Minds, between quantum entanglement and psi effects?
Radin - Entanglement was predicted by the mathematics of quantum theory. Quantum theory considers matter not only in particulate form, but also as waves of probability. The interesting thing about a wave is that it can combine and interfere with other waves. Based on this idea, two particles interacting could be understood in wavelike terms as the creation of a new, more complex wave. Not two waves, but one wave, and that one wave remains one system thereafter. So two particles that interact can no longer be considered separate. Einstein didn’t like this idea and called it “spooky action at a distance.” But the mathematics predict that if you have one particle that splits into two, or two particles that interact, once those particles separate they are no longer really separate. They both contain some aspect of each other.
For about 30 or 40 years this prediction about entanglement remained only a theoretical possibility. And then after development of a way to test whether the prediction was true or not in the 1960s, the first major replication of it was reported in the 1980s. The method was based on a theorem by Irish physicist John Bell. And so now we're in a position where we know, based not just on theory but also on empirical fact, that particles which appear to be separate can actually be connected through space and time in ways that appear to be spooky.
What's important then is that this is not just an interesting theoretical idea, but an observable fact about the fabric of reality. And understanding the nature of these entanglements is increasing fast. Between the time that I wrote my book and today, a half a dozen new discoveries about the nature of entanglement have been published. As I was writing the chapters on the physics of entanglement there were new discoveries reported about one a month. And this trend continues unabated.
What I require in the book is for entanglement, which is seen mainly at the elementary particle level now in physics labs, to scale up into bioentanglement, or entanglement in living systems. There have been all kinds of theoretical arguments proposed why bioentanglement shouldn't be possible. But the facts are beginning to contradict those arguments, as I predict in Entangled Minds. It’s my contention that bioentanglement must exist. And that people will continue to find more and more clever ways of demonstrating in fact that it does exist. Once bioentanglement is accepted, the next notion that will arise is, well, if it’s operating inside living systems, including us, then what would that feel like from the inside? That's what my book is about. Continued on page 2
