Want to Be a Physicist? Develop an Affinity for the Weird | George Musser | Big Think

The whole progress in physics is to start with our everyday experience and to analyze it and to look at it and to look for deviations from it. So the very nature of really all the natural sciences, but certainly of physics, is to really get away from our experience. So the things physics comes up with are just kind of weird. They are going to be because that’s just how the world operates. That’s how physics makes sense of the world.

Subatomic particles? We can’t see them directly, at least, but we know they’re there. We actually do thought experiments about the things we do see and deduce their existence. So already, even with just that limited example, we have gone intra beyond our direct experience. And a hundred years ago or so, people doubted the existence of atoms, let alone of subatomic particles.

Nonlocality, spooky action at a distance, is very much in that mold. It’s taken this yet further away from our experience. And therefore we expect it to be weird. It should be weird. That’s why physics is fun. If they were just reproducing the things we already knew, I mean, who really would care? It’s kind of fun because it’s taking us beyond our experience. It’s transcending our daily experience into this new realm that is weird.

And as other scientists have said, you expect it. In fact, if the theory isn’t weird, you kind of doubt it because you might worry that your own biases are intruding into the theory and causing you to think the world is a certain way when you’re not listening to the way the world actually is. So weirdness is, in a sense, a test of theory.

Now that said, you can’t just sit here and kind of just daydream over a beer and come up with more and more weird things. They have to somehow connect back to what we do observe, and that’s really the challenge of this whole field: well, with subatomic particles, how do they connect with what we do see? So they’re not just weirdness for weirdness' sake. It’s weirdness in a way that actually relates ultimately back to what we see.

And so it has to be with spooky action at a distance, with nonlocality that ultimately we get locality back; the quality of space that governs our lives has to emerge. It has to come out of the nonlocality that seems to reside at the very fabric of the deepest levels of the universe.

One instinct you might have when you learn about these connections among different particles and different objects in the universe is, “Aha, maybe that explains telepathy. Maybe that allows psychic powers. Maybe that bull that is apparat from Hogwarts into London or one of these things you would want to do.” And unfortunately, or actually I’ll come to in a sense fortunately, that’s not really possible.

It’s kind of unfortunate because you kind of would want those magical abilities. But it’s a case of you have to be careful what you wish for. So for example, suppose I could sit on my couch and just by psychic action get the Mets to win the World Series. So wouldn’t we want that? But unfortunately, all the other baseball teams would also have that psychic ability, and we would have this huge babble of psychic wits taking place among the couch potatoes of the world. So the baseball game itself, in that case, would be irrelevant.

In a more broad sense, our very existence depends on space. We’re spatial creatures. We even have a certain little volume of space. We have a shape. We have very spatial properties. And if space didn’t exist, we couldn’t exist. So we would kind of want the psychic powers, but if we had them, that would actually kind of undermine the very conditions of our own existence...