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Nonlocality

Nonlocality is an existential threat to physics as we know it. Yet these pesky experiments keep demonstrating it. The Big Ideas Reading Group discussed this in the context of our September 2016 book, Spooky Action at a Distance, by George Musser. I suggested that what we call nonlocality might really be locality, given the proper choice of topology. Consider Huygens neighbors, not just Newtonian neighbors. That distant entangled particle might really be adjacent, on a tangent brane, a short distance away along a compactified dimension. From this article, Susskind may also be thinking along those lines. Despite the objections of Lee Smolin (The Trouble with Physics) and Peter Woit (Not Even Wrong), string theory may turn out to be a useful pursuit after all.