ALL physics is spooky action at a distance, weird science : particularly Newton and Maxwell

EINSTEIN was right : it is spooky when NEWTON’s apple falls on our head, from a distance

Imagine you and your grandkids have been busy gathering apples in Cambridge England on a hot September afternoon.

Soon you tire and snooze under an apple tree, while your still quite energetic grandkids continue to cut up.

Suddenly one of the apples they were throwing about hits you on the brow.

A definite bruise but no concussion. You settle back to snooze again when an apple off the tree falls down hitting you on the brow —— again.

Now well and truly awake intellectually,  you ponder why.

You understand that the apple in grandchild’s hand plus energy of grandchild’s throwing arm will propel the apple forward to hit you, just as explosions and the wind only appear to be invisible blows to the brow.

You understand that they are actually the result of zillions of very energetic molecules colliding with the next molecules until the final molecules bounce hard off your brow.

But the apple on the tree : why always fall downwards : why not upwards or sideways or just lie there in mid air ?

Gravity, your science teacher taught you : Newton’s gravity, the cornerstone of classic (pre relativity, pre quantum) physics : spooky action at a distance : invisible forces and fields. 

Just like light and radio waves and magnets : as our teacher tells us about Maxwell’s spooky action at a distance : invisible forces and fields.

I confess, it never really felt right, not in Grade Eight and not now.

Physics, I remind people, is still basically all about that infamous high school experiment involving sticking that bloody flashing light in a very strong glass tube.

You remember that experiment don’t you ?

In addition, into the glass tube went a light receiver that briefly glows blue and makes a brief clicking sound whenever it sees those flashes, together with a small microphone next to the flashing light, this time wired to a speaker outside the glass tube.

At first we physics-skeptics are comfortable : as the light flashes we see the blue glow and hear the click on the external speaker.

But then almost all the air is extracted from the tube and while the light is still visibly flashing and the receiver is still visibly glowing blue, we no longer hear sound.

Sound (initially a thin circle of mylar moving forward and backwards rapidly), like the wind and explosions needs a lot of elastic molecules to interact by bouncing onto the molecules next to them till the last energetic molecules bounce on the thin mylar like surface of your ear drum and are perceived as sound.

But in the glass tube’s now near perfect vacuum, this no longer works : just like out in Space there are no sounds, no winds, no conventionally felt explosions.

But light and magnetism and radio waves still work in the vacuum : even faster in fact : via spooky actions at a distance : invisible forces and fields.

Chemistry, that other staple of High School Science, might seem like physics, but it is not - at least not totally.

For it is a great relief to learn in high school that atoms and ions actually occupy physical space and are more or less bulky : today we can actually see photographs of real atoms, unlike the still invisible forces and fields.

Those atoms collide with each other, just like air molecules and kids apples and my brow, sometimes bonding together and sometimes repelling each other.

At least on the surface, the bonding by exchanging electrons with each other seems like our now familiar apples but the repelling seems more like magnets pushing each other away : Physics’ spooky action at a distance again, invisible forces and fields.

Still generally, chemistry, like most sciences, even much of day to day physics, seems to match our own experience of our earthly physical world.

In our day to day world, most actions seem to be the result of physical touching, collisions (often elastic) : an atomistic and mechanical view of reality.

But the Queen sub-section of Physics (itself the Queen of all Sciences), Particle Physics, definitely deals in that section of reality where actions do not involve physical touching at all, ever.

Yet this is truly fundamental stuff : out of incredibly tiny and incredibly short lived particles are built the most massive and most long enduring edifices we know of : the galaxies and all their still massive subcomponents : stars and planets and us.

So yes, I do believe in Quantum physics, wholeheartedly. But I do not believe that it is at all simple, beautiful or rational : fundamentally it is based upon random momentary fluctuations  in vacuum space : inherently unpredictable.

So then does it not seem odd that physicists claim that they are all about revealing to us mere civilians the true and essential beauty and simplicity of all reality, based as it is on a handful of simple laws discovered by physics ?

When in reality, Physics has always been the one truly weird weird weird weird science, even back in the classic days of Newton and Maxwell? Even long before Einstein and Dirac arrived to really queer the pitch?

It is almost as if Physics is still in the closet, still so denying its true nature that every new discovery of more weird science must produce a new verbal reaction in the form of yet another paean to the true simplicity and beauty and rationality of fundamental physics.

Day to day reality, along with most sciences, is like the small “m” modernization process : its complex , chaotic, entangled, feedback loops up the yazoo.

Big “M” Modernity is like not-yet-out-of-the-closet Particle Physics : it is the self conscious counter-reaction as reality is daily revealed to be more chaotic and disorderly than we ever imagined or feared.

It uses terms like equilibrium, uniformitarianism, steady state universe, to insist that all that chaos is only on the surface ; deep down, at the most fundamental levels, reality (Quantum Reality) is really quite simple, beautiful, orderly and rational.

What ?!

So why are we still buying this guff .....