'Spooky Action at a Distance'

John Stewart Bell

Eric Wagner sent me a copy of a new review in The New York Review of Books of Spooky Action at a Distance, a new book by George Musser that explains how Irish physicist John Stewart Bell (often mentioned by Robert Anton Wilson) provided that "spooky action at a distance" between two particles, apparently violating the speed of light, was a real phenomena of quantum mechanics. It sounds like a very interesting book, and I enjoyed Jim Holt's review.

The review is behind a paywall, so I can't reproduce it here without violating copyright; you'll want to hunt up a copy. It seems like fair use to say that Holt lauds the book as "enlightening" and "highly entertaining" but that it has one "grave omission." It does not mention a model by physicist Roderich Tumulka that, Holt says, succeeds "in creating a model of nonlocal entanglement that fully abides by Einsteinian relativity."

Roderich Tumulka

Disappointingly, Holt says that the spooky action cannot be used for faster than light communication.