spooky action at a distance

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English

Etymology

Calque of German spukhafte Fernwirkung. Coined by Albert Einstein as spukhafte Fernwirkungen (“spooky actions at a distance”) in a letter to Max Born on 3 March 1947 to express his scepticism about quantum mechanics, where two particles may interact instantaneously over a distance.

Noun

spooky action at a distance (uncountable)

  1. (physics) Synonym of quantum entanglement
    • 2008 August 14, Daniel Salart, Augustin Baas, Cyril Branciard, Nicolas Gisin, Hugo Zbinden, “Testing the speed of ‘spooky action at a distance’”, in Nature, volume 454, number 7206, →DOI, page 863:
      The correlations are thus due either to entanglement, as predicted by quantum physics, or to some hypothetical spooky action at a distance whose speed we wish to bound from below.
    • 2011, Tim Maudlin, Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity: Metaphysical Intimations of Modern Physics, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 240:
      Of course, such a correlation is in principle possible to explain without any spooky action-at-a-distance: simply assume that the “particle” really is a particle, with a definite location at all times, and about half the time the particle goes to the right and half the time it goes to the left.
    • 2022 April 16, Stephen Boughn, “There Is No Spooky Action at a Distance in Quantum Mechanics”, in Entropy, volume 24, number 4, →DOI, page 560-6:
      Once one is lead down this path, it is inevitable to conclude that spooky action at a distance occurs in nature. On the other hand, if one eschews the ontological interpretation of the wave function, then “action at a distance” is, at best, descriptive of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics. One must be extremely wary of extending such inferences to physical reality itself.

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