Reality Is an Illusion

Albert Einstein was pissed off. 

First, Podolsky had just gone and submitted their paper without showing him the final version - it came out too formal and dry, and ended up burying the message under a mountain of jargon. Granted, he and Rosen had agreed to have Podolsky write it up, but it was still their joint effort. And now, The New York Times has the audacity to call him out with their caption: "Einstein Attacks Quantum Theory".

"Entschuldigen Sie, bitch?"

His purpose wasn't to attack the theory - he knew full well that it was a valid one. Hell, he was one of the people who built the damn thing. It worked.

He was just deeply worried what it would mean if it was true.

You see, his was the world of determinism - that the universe works in nice, predictable ways of cause and effect. But Quantum Theory didn't want to play nice; it wanted to play dice, so to speak, bringing a nasty element of randomness to how everything works. It wouldn't even allow things to be simply unknown, but fundamentally undefined until observed. And worst of all, there was quantum entanglement - a direct insult to Einstein's own discovery that nothing beats the speed of light. It undermined the basis of everything he knew was true about the universe.

In their paper (which would be called the EPR paper, as per the initials of the authors), Einstein and his colleagues only wanted to maintain a couple of ground rules for nature: one of locality, so that objects couldn't just affect each other in an instant regardless of distance, and one of realism, that physical things exist as they are, even when nobody is watching. They felt that since the Quantum Theory didn't comply with either, it must still need some work.

And honestly - those terms don't seem that unreasonable, do they?

However, Niels Bohr - one of the prime architects of the theory - wouldn't have any of such bullshit. He immediately struck back, essentially pointing out that "nope, there's nothing wrong or missing with Quantum Theory, you just don't want to accept it".

Pictured: the guy who gave Einstein a public lecture in physics.
Not pictured: his enormous balls.

The debate kept going, and Einstein kept working to reconcile the clash between classical and quantum physics, but he never found peace with it. Years later, while having a walk with a fellow physicist, he famously asked: "Do you really believe the moon is not there when nobody looks?".

About nine years after Einstein's death, an Irish physicist named John Bell provided a theorem by which it became possible to experimentally test if the EPR requirements could be met. And in 2022, a group of scientists - John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger - received their Nobel prize for proving that when it comes to locality and realism, one or the other has to go.

Before you say that's an easy choice because obviously, the physical world is real - you might want to consider why Einstein himself seemed more concerned about preserving locality. He simply couldn't accept that anything can just ignore it: Not only had he built his entire career around it, but his whole world view as well. 

 He also didn't want to think that traveling backwards in time could ever be possible.
 While cool in the movies, in reality it'd be all kinds of bad.

In case you are saying "but those are all just theories", hold on a bit. The word you are looking for is "hypothesis", and neither the Quantum Theory or the General Theory of Relativity fall under that term - both have been thoroughly tested and proven valid countless of times. Our modern life wouldn't be possible without them: If you're reading this on a computer or smartphone, it's because of Quantum Theory and if your device has access to GPS, it's because of General Relativity.

A scientific theory is a representation of something we can observe, a model. A good theory is a simplified depiction of its subject. All the unnecessary clutter that would only make it too cumbersome and less useful is left out.

And by the way, that is exactly what your brain is doing too - what you see, hear, smell and touch is not reality. It's a simplified, filtered representation of it.

It's all in your head.

There's a lot more going on around us, not to mention within us, than our senses can detect - and even most of the stuff our brains do pick up never enters our conscious mind. The rest we still process in the unconscious part of it though - in dreams, perhaps.

And that's my usual answer when someone asks me a question during a Teams meeting.

Then there's all the other living things: They share the world we live in, but they each experience their own version of it - one that's in no way compatible with ours. What would it be like if you were a snake? They are able to detect infrared radiation. Or maybe an octopus, whose arms each practically have a brain of their own? Fungi have been found to communicate, solve problems and process information.

I can only imagine what that feels like.

Our personal traits, biases and experiences all contribute to how we see the world and our place in it. It all looks different depending on our upbringing, cultural background and religious beliefs. Much like a physicist uses a theory to understand nature, our personal model of reality will guide us when we navigate through our lives - making predictions, finding patterns and connecting with other people.

Yet it will always remain a construct. You too have one that is uniquely yours, one that you can never truly share with anyone else. One that might be more fragile than you think. Could something shake its foundations, as happened to Albert Einstein?

Who knows - perhaps while reading this, you already felt a little nudge.