Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky and Me

(via mutha dot com)

Hawthorne wrote staring at the Great Stone Face across whole years; half my life--off & on-- i have had a similar enigma to guide me, or deride me, whatever: the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox (as Wikipedia would have it, though it remains in memory the other way round--E/R/P).

I was 21 & taking "20th Century Physics" a year before the advent of Raygun. I had been reading all kinds of weird shit: Plato, Gurdjieff/Ouspensky, Jung, Bateson, Patañjali, Wittgenstein, John Lilly. Simone Weil. I wanted to understand.

It's hard now to say just what sort of explanation would have suited me. Certainly the quasi-Hegelian mysticism i ended up with (for a very short while) did not. The truth is, i did not really know how to reason yet. I read the Einstein-Born letters like a correspondence between two poets. (And who was to say it wasn't?)

My college class entirely consisted, no kidding, of endless purple-mimeo sheets of expansions of the Schroedinger Wave Equation (i still have them somewhere), which my instructor laboriously explicated in messy transparencies upon an overhead projector. This led me to wonder just what would have been proven, once we had all ascertained there weren't any errors in the math. And what did it all mean?

I began cutting classes; finally, not coming at all. I had a little bit of mild pot, which i would smoke in a Portobello Road pipe out on the 2nd floor balcony with a view of the interurban sprawl known as Arlington, off in the distance. I had the xerox'd article on EPR from a physics journal i had actually tracked down on my own. It very much appeared that clown-headed Uncle Albert, who had revolutionized the world with a single quinquefoliate equation, was mistaken. --There wasn't any THERE, there.

Sometimes i would think of it as the Yin/Yang symbol. Identity was more like a stain than a circle. More of it lay close by, but some was mixed with the farthest lights in the sky. And all men were indeed brothers. And the stones beneath our feet partook of our very being.

That's rather a lot to read into what was basically a quibble over how to apply only the latest approximation of mathematical truth. I grew weary of overt paradoxes. One day a new, more comprehensive integration would sweep this one aside. The philosoraptors would have to go back to their self-consistent axioms, without the aid of theoretical physics. Strings, dark matter & darkling energy arrived trendily & i remained unmoved. I saw it as part of a publishing phenomenon, a contemporary career requirement. Truth, perhaps, must needs evade such succinct capture.

It was in the late 90's, internet days, that i heard of it again. E-P-R settled for good? After i had seen Jupiter's moons reached & the human genome spelled, 2 (or was it 3?) of the great math stumpers of all time defeated, & Continental Drift go from a controversial hypothesis to scientific orthodoxy, this might not have come as the shock it did. But did i care anymore?

I believe there is more than one possible mathematics, as there is more than one possible geometry. Nothing is harder to see, than an alternative that leads to the same outcome; yet paradoxes like this, which would insist on us subscribing to absurdities, are surely the signifiers of such a need. That's the rational side of me speaking. The other answers with Francis Bacon: "For, if the Grand Architect had acted a human part, he would have ranged the stars into some beautiful and elegant order, as we see in the vaulted roofs of palaces; whereas, we scarce find among such an infinite multitude of stars any figure either square, triangular, or rectilinear; so great a difference is there betwixt the spirit of man, and the spirit of the universe." --On the Dignity and Advancement of Learning IV, iv.