Tangled Up in Entanglement
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
"If I measure one electron in my lab, the second electron is affected by the measurement of the first electron with no time delay—instantaneously— even though a signal travelling at the speed of light would take millenia to cross the distance between them."
Yes, from our reference frame it takes millennia, but from a photon's reference frame (if that notion has any meaning) it is in fact instantaneous. Is this just a weird coincidence? I'm not sure how to even phrase it but is there some "quantum perspective" where the wave function collapse is synonymous with the speed of light reference frame?
It's interesting that an electron dropping to a lower energy state could be, in some sense, effectively connected to another electron millions of light years away via a photon whose reference frame would have no time pass or distance travelled.
Those two electrons are in a weird way as connected from the photon's perspective as two entangled electrons are from our perspective.
The alternative is that quantum physics encompasses a set of mathematical abstractions, which, while useful, are still abstractions, and just because an equation written on paper, using symbols, claims that a real world physical state is unknowable, doesn't mean that an unverified state is actually two things simultaneously, nor does it mean that human awareness of one state alters reality, in order to suit a change in human awareness.
Call this "Otaku's Rationale" why not?
Bell's Inequality shows that local hidden variables (with fixed values) are not compatible with the rest of what we know about physics.