Tangled

Lying down inside a machine every day that makes buzzing noises and flashing lights makes you (well…me) think of scientific things…like death rays…or protons and electrons. It’s protons that are being shot into me with their “search and destroy” mission, but electrons are just as interesting. Both of these particles get what scientists call “entangled,” and both of them do what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Don’t you love the language? It’s as if these things know each other really well and can predict what the other will do.

Mikael and Elai started showing their budding “entanglement” at the shower—in the shoe game. They each held a shoe in each hand, one of their own and one of the other person’s (they were both black sneakers, so we had to identify them by the laces), and when Carolyn asked a question like “Who is more romantic?” (Mikael), or “Who is more creative?” (Elai), they had to raise the appropriate shoe. Funny thing was, they answered identically almost every time, right down to the hesitations and the times they raised both shoes. Pretty good for beginners, I’d say. Hope it grows to perfection.

entangling machine!

Like electrons...which can appear in the universe already paired—already married, so to speak. These paired electrons always have opposite spins. If one spins up, the other always spins down, no matter what, because they are mirror images of one another. They are entangled. If you split these entangled (married) particles apart and send them far away from each other, they stay connected somehow. They communicate telepathically, faster than the speed of light, and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Einstein called this spooky and tried very hard to disprove it. The experiment that annoyed him goes like this. If you split married electrons and send them down different paths, and you randomly change the spin of one of the electrons, guess what happens to the spin of the other electron? Yes, it will still be the opposite of its pair. You can measure it at the same instance you change the first one, and it will always mirror its fellow, even when there was no time for the change to be communicated. How does it know?

And protons do something similar. If you split a proton in two, sending half of its light to one lab and the other half to another lab, and then you try to detect where the photon traveled, Lab A or Lab B, you’ll always only ever detect one photon. It might be in Lab A or Lab B, but never both. It’s described as a wave traveling to both labs, but when you measure it as a particle in one or the other, you find that photon particle somewhere and the wave collapses in the other lab. It disappears. You only ever find one photon even though the wave went to both labs.  How does that wave know?

Spooky action at a distance and entanglement happens everywhere, as if a God who is One is giving us lessons. In humans, psychologists see it in mirror neurons. That’s what makes you yawn (go ahead) because someone else is yawning. It makes you react when things aren’t happening to you directly. When something happens to someone you love, someone with whom you have been paired or entangled, your neurons fire exactly as theirs fire. You feel their disappointment, their joy, their anger. You react. Oh, I don’t mean you get telepathic messages when someone you love is in trouble (although God prompts you to pray sometimes, and Einstein would call that “spooky”). What I mean is that there are ties between us that surprise us. They make us do strange things like drive to Michigan in the middle of the night or choose the right color dishes on a gift registry. We can predict each other’s actions and be affected by them even over distance.  When a red car door shuts and you hear the engine slowly move away, or you see short brown hair through a bus window and still walk away, all your protons and electrons ache because they are paired with what is moving away.

We’re more tied than we think. We’re practicing for the time when we are “One, even as the Father and I are One,” the ultimate entanglement, the source of all “spooky action at a distance.” Marriage, and everything that we do because love “pairs” us, is a preview, a rehearsal. It’s the purpose of all life. Gradually, we should be getting this with every neighbor, though we can’t imagine how that could be possible. Even so, ultimately, we will be playing the shoe game as one body and knowing as we are known. We will “be of one mind.” Finally. We have such a long way to go. But at the end, the wedding will be breath-taking and the pairing finally perfect. Better, even, than electrons.

We should be taking notes and practicing.