Your morning begins with some funny thoughts coming in your mind: you enter in the kitchen and take a look at a few things…the oven, the kettle, the dish-washer, the refrigerator, your favorite coffee mug…and you notice something: Whether I decide to have a look at those things or not, they are ‘just there’ at their usual places…
And then, you laugh at this thought and say to yourself — Isn’t it obvious? How does it matter — whether I take a look at my coffee mug or not, it will continue to be there, where it was! — of course, until and unless you or somebody else shifts it to a different place.
A bit more analysis shows that this commonly held belief — of the existence of things independent of our noticing of those things — is very closely related to our equally common assumption about the nature of our surrounding reality, that the things in nature have existence from their own side.
In physics it is called the tenet of ‘realism’ — the physical world (reality) consists of things, that have existence from their own side and this existence is independent of our consciousness.
It can be said that, ‘realism’ is the earliest tenet on which most of the physics frameworks are built. For example, to explain the motion of an object under gravity (when it is falling down toward the centre of our Earth), one has to — first of all — believe in the existence of both — that ‘object’ and of our ‘Earth’ — from their ‘own side’.
In Newtonian Physics the idea of gravitational ‘field’ is developed. Such a field is taken as existing in the vicinity of any two objects on account of their masses. The idea of gravity as a ‘field’ provides the ‘cause’ behind the ‘effect’ of the ‘falling’ of objects down to the ground.
Now there’s a problem: The Newtonian Physics paradigm does not describe gravity as a ‘propagating’ field, i.e. as something that goes from one thing to another in some time. It rather implicitly assumes gravity as a ‘fixed’ or ‘as-it-is’ field existing between distant objects.
Consequently, in Newtonian Physics the gravitational ‘influence’ of one object onto another distant object is understood as taking place ‘instantaneously’ — i.e. without taking any time.
Einstein expressed a strong reservation against the idea of such a distant ‘cause’ leading to an instantaneous ‘effect’ and regarded it as a ‘SPOOKY’ (sinister or ghostly or scary) action-at-a distance — for the ‘cause’ must precede the ‘effect’. Something at one location can’t affect something else at a distant location instantly…
Einstein had no problem with the tenet of ‘realism’ — in fact, throughout his life, he remained as the giant supporter of ‘realism’ — but he supported ‘local’ realism’, not the ‘spooky’ one!
Is the reality of a coffee mug spooky or local?
Exploration continues…
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-vikram-athalye/recent-activity/articles
