The other reason why it's difficult to grasp the idea of entanglement is because we don't have the right words for such holistic concepts … language is based largely on common sense, and this is more like uncommon not-sense. So our modes of thinking, the way that we express and explain things, are ultimately based on the assumption of isolation and separateness. But here we're trying to talk about some other aspect of reality which is completely holistic. And because we don't have the right language for these ideas yet, sometimes it’s difficult to keep these things straight. Even physicists get confused about this occasionally…

WTB – Ah, I feel better, thank you.

Radin – Yeah. One way to think about entanglement is to imagine you have two photons, each of which has a spin; one might be spinning up, one might be spinning down. Entanglement means that the spins are correlated. Now, imagine that rather than photons you're dealing with something like little spinning toy tops. So you create an entangled pair of tops: one spinning left and one spinning right. Stick each one in a box and take the two boxes to opposite ends of the universe by a courier who doesn't know which direction the tops are spinning. And then when somebody opens a box at one end of the universe, and they see that it's spinning to the right - well, they know the matched pair top must be spinning to the left, because that’s how they were set up as an entangled pair.

So now you're thinking, what's so amazing about that? How could it be any other way? Why is this considered spooky? The answer is that because we're not dealing with ordinary objects. If the tops are behaving in a quantum way, then before we looked at them they literally wouldn’t have any properties. The tops would be in what's called an indeterminate state. Properties like spin – in fact many properties of a quantum particle - are not actually determined until they are measured. As a result, if you take a bunch of entangled objects, in which none of the objects have any determined properties yet, including spin….

WTB – So spin is in potentia?

Radin - It's something that in a sense we project onto the object.

WTB - Yeah, because what we call spin is not even really spin.

Radin – What we call that property is in an indeterminate, unknowable “gray state”…. then we look at it and suddenly we can measure all kinds of properties that we assign to it. So let’s say now we have two boxes, each with some kind of gray, vague spinning top-like object in it. These boxes are taken to either ends of the universe, and one is opened, and suddenly the object inside is found to have a whole host of properties. The other object will then have perfectly mirrored properties, instantaneously. So how did the one top in the box that was first observed “communicate” with the other top so it would show the opposite set of properties? That's the mysterious, spooky connection.       Continued on page 4