Limits - Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything - page 111

Suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings
up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematize
what it reveals. He arrives at two generalizations:
1) No sea-creature is less than two inches long.
2) All sea-creatures have gills. cxlv
The catch stands for our scientific body of knowledge and the net for the sensory and cognitive
apparatus used to obtain it. Together they invite a few questions. What's the relationship
between catches and confidence? How many catches do we need? And how big are the holes in
our net?
Figure 5-11. The limits of perception and cognition.
Of course, we often don't get what we do catch. For instance, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
tells us the position and momentum of a subatomic particle can't be measured concurrently with
precision. This isn't a limit of technology but a consequence of the connectedness between obser-
vation and outcome. The properties of an object don't exist before they're measured. The experi-
menter is part of the experiment.
This leads to an even stranger aspect of quantum mechanics known as entanglement. In a pair of
entangled particles, total spin is zero, so the instant one particle is measured and collapses into a
spin direction, the other must collapse the opposite way, even if the two particles are light-years
apart.
Einstein believed instant information transfer across infinite distance or “spooky action at a dis-
tance” to be impossible, but its effects have been shown experimentally. Researchers are explor-
ing the use of entanglement for communication and computation. Recently, Dutch physicists
were able to teleport quantum data over a ten foot distance with a replication rate of 100 per-
cent. cxlvi It appears that Albert Einstein was wrong.