Nonlocal Realism
The Deeper Reality behind the reality we experience
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‘Local Realism’ says that: (a) physical objects are real, with properties independent of observation; and (b) such objects can only affect, or be affected by, other objects in their own locality. In practice this means that two spacetime entities – material objects or photons – at any distance from each other cannot interact faster than the speed of light. In other words, an action relating to entity a cannot affect entity b in less time than it would take for light to travel from a to b. This is implied by a central premise of Special Relativity that the speed of light is absolute: neither matter nor information can travel faster than light.
In 2022 Dr John Clauser received a Nobel prize for demonstrating 50 years earlier a situation in which information of some kind is being passed between two spacetime entities far faster than the speed of light – effectively instantaneously, across potentially very large distances. The two other Nobel laureates sharing that award had, at later times, confirmed this effect to an increasingly robust degree, as well as demonstrating its practical usefulness.
The effect in question is Quantum Entanglement, the linking of two photons or material particles such that their destinies are entwined even if widely separated: an effect on one (such as pinning down its spin state or polarization state) immediately causes a complementary state in the other. This connection over potentially vast distances is referred to as Quantum Nonlocality.
These proven effects are incompatible with Local Realism. Not surprisingly, then, Einstein was opposed to these concepts which arose from Quantum Mechanics (QM), proposing that QM was incomplete and should include some sort of hidden variables in quantum entities which would give the illusion that they were interacting. Clauser’s experiment proved definitively that these effects could not be explained by any form of hidden variables. Talking in his Nobel lecture of his own experiments 50 years before, as well as those of the other two Nobel laureates, he said of Local Realism: “Unfortunately it’s wrong, which is what the experiments show”. Later in his presentation he again described Local Realism as “dead on arrival”.
So, if the Local Realism of Einsteinian Relativity is “Dead, Jim” (again quoting Clauser, who was himself quoting Star Trek), what are we left with? Surely we’re living in some sort of reality – and if that reality is not bound by local effects than what we have left is a reality in which interactions are not wholly local: Nonlocal Reality.
This is not so fanciful as it may seem, we just need to dig a little deeper. When we do, we may find ourselves living in a radically different universe from the one we thought we inhabit.
First, we know that photons of light are nonlocal. A single photon can pass simultaneously through two slits in a piece of card, as shown countless times by the legendary 2-slit experiment. More than this, the light from those slits – a single photon again – can land anywhere on a screen on the far side from the light, with a probability-based pattern which tells us that the electromagnetic (EM) field of that photon –i.e . the photon in flight – is spread over a very wide area. By the same principle, the EM field of a single photon emitted from a point source will diverge in flight, covering an ever-greater area at its wavefront, with the potential to register at any point on that wavefront on contact with a material object (given the right circumstances).
But let’s not stop there. It’s been shown that electrons can do the same trick of producing an ‘interference pattern’, showing that they, too, are travelling as a distributed wave and not as a local particle. More than this, there’s an extensive body of top quality research – much of it from Nobel laureates – pointing clearly to the notion of electrons, and by extension all material particles, being formed from localised configurations of photons. [Download my peer-reviewed journal paper here and/or see my Substack paper here, both referencing many relevant research studies.] The life story of the humble muon is a bit of a giveaway, too – see my brief Substack post on that here. As an added bonus, this photon-formed understanding of material particles provides a full causal explanation for all effects attributed to Special Relativity as well as a coherent and consistent rationale for all effects attributed to General Relativity – notably gravitation – all without need of any unexplained properties of our space-time universe. Highly credible explanations for electric charge and antimatter – including the dramatic imbalance between matter & antimatter and the reason for CPT symmetry – all drop out from this very logical perspective.
This then begs the question: if free-flying photons – light et al – are intrinsically distributed/nonlocal, then would not the photons forming material particles likewise be so? This reasoning is borne out by the interference patterns produced by streams of single sequential electrons.
The logical inference from this line of reasoning is mind-blowing – literally mind-expanding, in a very real way. It implies, unequivocally, that every physical construct in the material universe is nonlocal – that locality is a characteristic we attribute to physical objects and situations in response to information provided by our physical senses.
Consider your eyes. They receive a melee (or two, for most of us) of rapidly-oscillating electromagnetic wave patterns and somehow resolve them into an image of a landscape, a face, a vase of flowers or whatever *. But those waves are, we know, distributed; they have the capacity to register their ‘payload’, in respect of each photon, in any number of places. How does the eye achieve the remarkable feat of marshalling all these individual ‘payloads’ into a coherent image?
[* Note that there’s no sign of that ‘image in transit’ in the space between the observed object and your eye.]
The answer, of course, is by focusing through a lens – just as it is for a camera or other optical instrument. But a lens doesn’t magically turn a distributed wavelike entity into a localised particle-like entity. No, what a lens does is to concentrate that wavelike spread of visual information into a narrow point-like beam, maximising the amplitude of the received signal at a point, so giving a high probability (a focus) of such signals being registered in accordance with some tightly-defined pattern: the clear image. This is very apparent when that image is ‘out of focus’: the optical properties of the lens are not optimally collating the incoming distributed electromagnetic ‘packet’ of information, the image still has an element of that distributed nature about it: we say the image is blurred (a similar effect to being smudged).
“Yes”, you may say, “but that’s just the waves carrying the image. The original object is still very much local. I can feel it, trace it with my fingers”.
Yes you can. But that sense of touch is also mediated by photons, so-called ‘virtual photons’ in this case. The negatively charged electrons orbiting the atoms of your fingertips are repelled by the negatively charged electrons orbiting the atoms of the object you’re touching, triggering your nerve endings to send a ‘touch’ message to your brain. Your brain interprets this as a localised effect, but it’s actually an electromagnetic field effect which need not be local at all.
In short, the very idea of ‘local’ is a concept which is quite possibly manufactured by your brain to make it easier for you to navigate the quantum electromagnetic field landscape which is our true environment. If the blinkers of our sensory navigational aids were removed, we would likely be totally shocked by our surroundings – and by our own selves. (Any seasoned LSD tripper may well have experienced aspects of this).
“Nonsense!”, I hear someone say. “We’ve been able to see and feel and hear – and smell – our environment for millions of years, since the dawn of the human race. Nothing like that is going to escape our attention!”
Maybe. Then how is it that less than 140 years ago it was discovered that the universe is awash with a sort of ‘invisible light’ which our sensory receptors didn’t tell us about – but which now dominates every aspect of our lives? That less than 30 years ago it was discovered that our eyes include sensors which have nothing to do with the shapes or colours that we see – but which are vital to our very existence? That less than 25 years ago it was found that every pineal gland, in every human brain, contains tens of thousands of sub-microscopic calcite crystals which are almost certainly piezoelectric – sensors of some sort, no doubt, but we have no idea of what or why?
Just a century ago, a blink of an eye in the history of our species, Henrietta Swan Leavitt and Edwin Hubble between them expanded our perception of the universe many trillion-fold. They showed us that untold numbers of those little nebulae astronomers could see out in space were in fact other galaxies, many of them vastly bigger than our own home Milky Way which we thought was the only one. Is it so unthinkable that another ‘quantum leap’ in our awareness could open up a whole new vista on the nature of the cosmos we think (and we thought a century ago) we know so well?
Let’s just recall that distinctly non-local effect explicitly recognised by a highly distinguished body of top scientists in triple Nobel awards for triple confirmation of its authenticity. Let’s note also that Quantum Entanglement has been demonstrated empirically between macroscopic objects visible to the naked eye. This phenomenon actually raises two searching questions:
(1) How does information pass between two entangled entities faster than the speed of light?
(2) How does, for example, one electron select out its entangled partner, possibly kilometres away, from all the other electrons in the cosmos to register its effect with that one, and that one only?
The only plausible explanation, it would seem, is that the appearance of separation between these two entangled entities is in fact an illusion; that these two entities are, in some way and at some level, physically joined – maybe even at some level just two parts of a single undivided unit. This takes us straight into the field of Nonlocal Realism, since it shows us very clearly that localisation (as we perceive it) is definitely not a prerequisite for real effects, real interactions, real connections.
We live in a causal universe: effects are, without exception, preceded by causes. (Special Relativity [SR] proposes that this ordering could potentially be reversed by faster-than-light communications – but as Dr Clauser has advised us, we need to be at least sceptical about such unproven pronouncements from SR). It’s now clear that this causality is implemented, at least in part, by nonlocal mechanisms. How can this be?
What’s needed, it seems, to build our nonlocal reality is some sort of ubiquitous building-block, an ultra-versatile Lego brick that can be in countless places at the same time (using ‘localising’ language), but without shifting can be exactly where you need it exactly when you need it. Or some sort of building clay of which you can take a ball, roll it out as thin and as widespread as you like - but the entire weight of that whole ball of clay is instantly available at any point on that whole spread-out sheet, not just the bit at that point. But that’s nonsense, isn’t it? How can you have the whole of something available at any point, when it’s spread out so thin? How could you even measure the amount of that ball of clay when you’re just dealing with a tiny part of it? How can you pin down a Lego brick to one particular place when its nature is to be in countless places at once? How can you even know the quantity of Lego brick available for your use when it’s here, there, and everywhere?
Obviously this requires some sort of imprinting throughout that brick, throughout that ball of clay – like the wording through a stick of Blackpool rock – telling its complete value at every tiniest point in its substance. And that’s exactly what we have in the universal building-block of our physical universe – the photon. Every photon contains at every point within its widely-distributed substance a marker of its total energy content (and so also its mass, when bound up in matter: m = E/c2). The energy content of any photon is given by its frequency, a truly non-local measure which can be found at any point in its substance, however widespread. This is the true significance of Planck’s discovery: not that the fundamental feature of a photon is its frequency and that its energy level depends on this, but rather that its essential characteristic is its energy content – that’s its ‘payload’ – and its frequency is a measure of that payload, like the writing on a box telling us the mass of the box’s contents. This is how the universal process knows what to expect in terms of energy transfer if it chooses to ‘cash in’ that photon at any point – a truly nonlocal energy transfer system!
[Note for the advanced student: we’re told that such ‘cashing-in’ involves collapse of the photon’s widespread wave to a point, with the wave instantaneously ceasing to exist everywhere else – a process not in any way supported by Maxwell’s equations. Note that rather the ‘point’ at which the photon registers – an eye, a flower, a fingertip – is itself a distributed entity; the impression of localisation is an illusion, as outlined earlier. So the transfer/absorption of that photon’s energy is in actuality an entrainment of the photon’s waveform into the waveform of the receiving object – a nonlocal-to-nonlocal smooth energy flow.]
More than anything else so far, this nonlocal ubiquitous marker of a photon’s energy content is surely positive proof that we live in an intrinsically nonlocal reality, a universe in which Nonlocal Realism is the order of the day. This ‘cosmic Lego brick’, the basic structural unit of our physical reality, is – whether by accident or design – a perfect fit for a reality in which localisation is not a basic requirement but rather a construct, an impression woven by these nonlocal elements we call photons.
If we could get our heads around this concept of Nonlocal Realism as the underlying reality behind the limited mapping of the universe revealed to us by our space-time senses, we might stand a real chance of finding our way out among the stars – not to mention a real understanding of who and what we truly are.
[As a footnote you may find of interest: Alford (AKA 'Alfred') Korzybski, the father of modern semantics, says in his book 'Science and Sanity' : "The map is not the territory - but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness". A road map or a walker’s map, for example, represents various features symbolically, such as roads and towns, or contour lines for height variations. These are not the same, of course, as those features themselves, but they are ‘correct’ (hopefully!) in terms of representing those features in a meaningful way. By the same token, the map provided by our senses of our true nonlocal environment is ‘correct’ in giving a meaningful representation of that environment which enables us to navigate our way around it and interact with it effectively.]
Find links for dozens more Substack posts in this vein at https://transfinitemind.com/BST.html. Also various books, as well as plenty of free resources, at www.transfinitemind.com.
See you next time around!