The Principle of Uncertainty: Faster than the speed of light?

When this happened, Einstein was not exactly very happy with this line of tought. After all, at the moment, Newtonian mathematics was the firm foundation of conventional and widely accepted science, and accurate determination of position and velocity of objects enabled one to predict their future behaviour. Einstein simply could not accept the ‘fuzziness’ of Uncertainty and believed that there must be other as-yet unknown factors, ‘hidden local variables’, which just were waiting to be discovered and used in order to measure position and speed accurately. He made his famous assertation "God does not play dice with the universe", to which statement Neils Bohr, a strong believer and proponent of Uncertainty, replied "Don’t tell God what to do!" (Goswami, 1993)

Einstein became obsessed trying to prove that it must be possible to measure both position and momentum of sub-atomic particles simultaneously, but alas! despite his undisputed geniality, he was unable to prove it and apparently he was very wrong, not only in regard to uncertainty but also in his belief that nothing could move faster than the speed of light.Now we know that good ol' Alber was wrong, very wrong... learn here about Superluminic Velocity, where light travels faster than the speed of light.

The discussion ended in the 1960s, when John Bell, a British physicist, devised mathematical relationships which would be true if the local variables predicted by Einstein really were influencing the behaviour of quantum particles. Bell showed that they did not agree with experimental observations; in other words, he demonstrated that Einstein was wrong.

Furthermore, Bell’s mathematics predicted that if any hidden variables were determining the paths of quantum particles, then they must act outside the limitations of time and space. Thus came the technical term for this, which is known as ‘non-locality’, which points to an aspect of reality where the interaction between objects does not diminish with distance, so it can act instantaneously, obviously much faster than the speed of light, linking up locations without crossing space.

If two particles are linked in some way, (e.g. opposite spin or correlated in their polarisation), then the act of observing one should cause changes to the other instantaneously, no matter how remote in distance it might be. The implications are stunning! because it implies that communication faster than the speed of light is quite possible, and that distance is no object.

Weird Science Finally, Bell’s predictions were confirmed in Paris, in 1982 by Alain Aspect and his colleagues. How they did it? Read More

The Quantum Revolution: Science and Spirituality Max Planck, at the turn of the past century, made observations regarding how light was emitted by hot objects. Read More