Readers of this blog may have noticed that I am fascinated by both quantum entanglement and the admittedly far-fetched idea that the universe may be conscious in some way. I have begun to see how these two things might be connected.
Quantum entanglement is the label physicists have given to the phenomenon whereby two subatomic particles are connected in such a way that when something happens to one of the particles, the other particle is instantly affected, no matter how far away they are from each other. A Chinese scientist and his team recently proved this by entangling photons on an orbiting satellite and then beaming them to two different laboratories on the ground 750 miles apart, without losing their entangled properties (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aan3211).
Scientists are quick to say that entanglement doesn’t depend on faster-than-light communication (which is currently theoretically impossible), but they also cannot explain how it works. Theoretically, though, there is no distance limit for entanglement. Theoretically, two particles entangled at their inception but separated by the size of the universe would still be entangled.
And that’s where it gets really interesting. Every particle in the universe was created at the big bang (or very shortly afterward, once energy began to coalesce into particles). That means that every particle in the universe is entangled with other particles. Most of these particles are now separated by trillions of light years (which, it must be understood, is a measure of distance, not time; it’s a measure of how far a photon travels in a year; It’s really, really far), but if something affects one particle, it’s sister particle would also be affected, even if it’s halfway across the universe.
In other words, information can be conveyed instantaneously over vast distances.
In a previous post, I noted the striking similarity between neural maps of a brain and maps of the large-scale structure of the universe (http://jimmastro.com/is-the-universe-conscious/), and I wondered if the universe could somehow actually be a conscious entity. But how could that work, if information can only be transmitted at the speed of light? Any universal “thought” would take so long to happen that the age of the universe might no be long enough. But if information can be instantly conveyed (notice that I did not say “transmitted”) because of entanglement, then “thoughts” could occur as fast as they do in the human brain.
Pretty speculative, I grant you, but entanglement makes it a possibility, even if a very remote one. Still, I am a science fiction writer, after all. Ideas like this are fun to consider.
