“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, November 1, 2012

Either/Or

Either relativity is wack, or ontically given "local realism" (where things are real because they are constantly present here or there in spacetime) is wack. You can't have both at once, since entanglement exists. Guess which one I'm going to drop, and it isn't Einstein. Thanks to Ben Abraham. This piece is a precis of a Nature Physics essay that recently came out.

As Graham Harman happily observed when he chatted with Anton Zeilinger, to put an object in a quantum state is to withdraw it from as many relations as possible. Right? Right?

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