How entanglement redefines realism and locality

Special Relativity leads to Quantum Mechanics

I’ve decided to rewrite one of my most-viewed comments as a short article, since it nicely bridges my very first article on how the speed of light is instantaneity in disguise with the second one about how the instant but lightlike interactions that unfold each time shape everything that exists in the universe.

Einstein, locality and realism

Einstein completely changed our concepts of absolute space and time with his Theory of Relativity, but he couldn’t stand Quantum Mechanics implied “spooky actions at a distance”, so he conceived the EPR paradox as an argument to prove Quantum Mechanics was incomplete, but ended up cementing the concept of entanglement as something real instead.

Worst of all, he had already solved his own riddle beforehand. The answer to entanglement was right before his eyes, hidden in his own theory of Special Relativity, which completely changes the way space, time and simultaneity is experienced by any entity able to reach the speed of light exactly.

Einstein objected to Quantum Physics on the principles of realism (entities having determined intrinsic properties) and locality (entities being affected only by their immediate surroundings). The problem is that Einstein didn’t fully grasp how his own theory forces us to redefine these two terms.

Einstein changed the way we think about space and time by taking the constancy of the speed of light at face value. But he should have gone further. Had he followed the logical consequences of his own theory, he would have found a natural explanation for entanglement, and realized that the principles of locality and realism are mere artifacts of our subjective frames of reference, just like our subjective units of space and time.

The key to solving entanglement lies in adjusting two basic assumptions about the meaning of the speed of light and the nature of particles and interactions. These, in turn, will modify our concepts of locality and realism, explaining entanglement in an intuitive way.

So picking up where Einstein left, we find a new perspective to understand the universe: Influences cannot travel faster than the speed of light, but material particles can be entangled at separate ends of the universe because both sentences are true at the same time, since what to us, material observers, constitute phenomena propagating at the speed of light, means instantaneity for the massless quanta involved.

Special Relativity

Special Relativity tells us that if we could travel as close to the speed of light as we wanted, we could traverse the entire universe in any unit of time (proper time) we wanted, just by adjusting our speed closer to that of light. Time will tick slower due to the time dilation effects caused by our motion, and if we could reach the speed of light exactly, time would stop ticking altogether. We would experience going nowhere in no time, leaving and arriving at the same time. Emission and detection (and everything in between) would be the same instant blink of existence for us.

This is exactly what the massless quanta (photons, gluons…) and field perturbations which appear to us to propagate at the speed of light are able to pull off. What material observers experience as different spacetime intervals is always “condensed” into single blinks of existence for the massless quanta involved. Any distance, duration or sequence of events we think they covered, lasted or endured gets compressed into a single point and instant of simultaneous timeless existence for them.

So it’s not that we have to choose between exchanges propagating at the speed of light or events instantly connected through spacetime, it’s both things at the same time, just experienced from different perspectives.

Speed of light means instantaneity

The moment we introduce space and time to describe how the universe works, we’re choosing a particular frame of reference that’s only valid for a specific set of material entities. But the objective reality of any massless entity is what it would experience for itself: that “no time elapses”, regardless of what any material observer might have to say about it.

So the true nature of any phenomenon that manifests to us as traveling at the speed of light is the instant bridge it represents through spacetime, not the subjective time interval of any material observer. We should stop thinking of massless quanta as entities or processes propagating through spacetime at the speed of light. They are more like instant connections between different spacetime coordinates that comply with the light speed ratio.

Thus, the speed of light is constant and the same for all observers because it’s just the incredibly distorted way in which these instant spacetime connections are mapped onto the subjective frames of reference of the different observers, so whenever we observe that the speed of light is involved in shaping some phenomena, we must rest assured some form of timelessness, instantaneity or simultaneity is implied.

Then, any massless perturbation (photon, gluon…) represents more of an entanglement between emitter and absorber than a particle traveling between them. Any field disturbance we imagine propagating through spacetime at c is also the entire emission-flight-detection process we imagine, somehow.

Massless quanta experience the time intervals and sequences we infer for them all at once in no particular order. The phenomena that appear to us to conform to the speed of light don’t experience our spacetime dimensions. They don’t know what “here”, “there”, “before” or “after” means, so our “spooky action at a distance” is “action at spooky distance” to them.

Entanglement

This explains how entangled photons can show weird correlations, even when their detections appear to be separated by large distances and time spans from our reference frame: It doesn’t matter how far apart in opposite directions two entangled photons appear to us, nor what specific sequence of events they seem to have endured during the interval we think they “flew” out there, nor which one appears to be detected before or after the other because, for themselves, all the spooky spacetime connections we observe are one and the same indivisible ensemble, where the common emission event and all related detections (no matter how scattered through spacetime) form a single instantaneous action/reaction event with no spacetime properties, as long as the intervals we observe for them keep them related by the speed of light. Each carrier related to a given entanglement event still feels linked to that entanglement event wherever/whenever it is detected, by virtue of the speed of light.

Entities, processes and properties

We should modify our notion of locality, because every piece of matter is affected by all the fundamental interactions that reach it at the speed of light at any given moment, no matter how past or distant the events to which those lightlike exchanges connect to. If a photon generated 13 billion years ago or 13 billion lightyears away can change the state of a detector here and now, then what does “locality” even mean? What can be called “immediate surroundings” when everything within the cosmological horizon can affect the observer?

But if the speed of light is key for entanglement, then, how is it possible for some material particles to show entanglement at speeds other than c?

This is where our new understanding of fundamental interactions as instant spacetime connections modifies our idea of realism:

We should stop thinking that each element of reality (matter, forces or spacetime) is composed of different fundamental entities, with different intrinsic properties. Everything is just a pattern of fields or a network of fundamental interactions. In the end, every energy or information exchange, every piece of matter, every structure, property, sequence, entity or process that physically exists in the universe is made up of the instant but lightlike interactions (spacetime relations) that shape it internally and those that communicate it externally. Massless quanta and field perturbations are not little carriers that propagate through spacetime at the speed of light, but more like wormholes or “short circuits” that instantly connect different spacetime coordinates, always complying with the light speed ratio.

Thus, the lightlike interactions that unfold each time form a network of instant relations that connect spacetime from past to present, stitching reality each time. All the massless carriers we depict as travelling through the universe at the speed of light are, at the same time, the instantaneous entangled connections that create the spacetime structure itself, the information exchanges that hold up reality and make it self-consistent with all past history automatically. Properties are not “carried” by material particles, nor “propagated” by massless quanta. The entire universe (including all its history) is re-created before our eyes each and every time by the fundamental interactions that instantly connect past states to the present moment through light-speed relations. Nothing “evolves” through spacetime. Not energy. Not light. Not matter. Entities and processes are emergent phenomena that arise from the patterns created by the lightlike interactions that unfold each time, fulfilling the constraints and consistency conditions set by previous interactions and among themselves.

In this respect, Einstein was wrong about the fact that entities can only be affected by their close environment (incorrect notion of locality), since any past event can affect them if the conditions for a lightlike exchange are met, and also wrong about the existence of predefined properties (incorrect notion of realism), since everything is set to specifications but “on the fly”, so there’s no way to know something perfectly before it happens, as we never know exactly what interactions will develop next.

And although Quantum Mechanics is rightly suspicious of the notion of locality, it still tries to explain the world with concepts and mechanisms that change or evolve in time themselves (wavefunction superpositions and collapses, branching many worlds, observer’s consciousness…), but no mechanism or concept that changes or evolves in time could properly describe the instant nature of the universe, since every interaction that pops up into reality is already a collapsed wavefunction that fulfills all the requirements for the sequence of events we imagined it faced one after the other at the speed of light.

Entanglement as fundamental principle

Everything is made up of these instant spacetime relations, so entanglement is the fundamental principle that drives the universe. It is not that massive particles can show some entangled properties under very specific conditions. When we prepare a Bell experiment (whether with massless or massive particles), we are not creating the right conditions for entanglement to develop, we are creating the right conditions for entanglement to show up. Entanglement, though difficult to observe, underlies every physical property, structure process or phenomenon that exists. And as mentioned earlier, any energy or information exchange is also an instant action/reaction event, which ensures that conservation laws are automatically enforced, no matter what phenomena unfold in spacetime. So entanglement is not a consequence of conservation laws, for it is entanglement that supports and enforces the conservation laws.

This dual perspective of light speed as instantaneity explains entanglement, and from there, all quantum weirdness can be explained. There’s no need to call for extra dimensions, parallel worlds, retrocausal waves, superdeterminism or any other convoluted spacetime mechanisms, since the massless quanta that shape reality don’t know what the measurement problem is, as they know nothing about our space or time dimensions. They have, literally, no time to evolve, and there’s no “where” or “when” to change, since the whole process we think takes place in sequence is also an indivisible “happening” they experience instantly.