Ask A Genius 1349: Aging, Billy Connolly, and Misconceptions About Quantum Entanglement
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/04/10
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I tapped the bar.
Rick Rosner: I said, “Go to okay.”
Jacobsen: You said, “Go to okay,” and the first thing that popped into my mind was Billy Connolly. I think this was even well before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
Basically, the joke was that, as you get older, things just become more vague. When you’re young, you’re specific: “Yeah, it’s two blocks straight, take your first right, then your first left onto Smith Avenue, and it’ll be right there.” No problem. And you’re pointing with your finger.
Then, as you age, you’re just tilting your head: “Yeah, it’s over there.” Eventually, you’re not even pointing anymore — you’re just lifting your leg in the general direction: “Yeah… there.” And so, “Push okay” had that same vibe. Like, “Oh, okay — it’s a milestone moment.” Or just, “Push okay.” Okay.
Rosner: Actually, I had another short topic — just a follow-up on yesterday when we were talking about spooky action at a distance. Right — you can’t use quantum entanglement to transmit usable information faster than light. Even though measurements of entangled particles are correlated, there’s no way to control the outcome on one side to send a message to the other.
Someone once gave an example with shoes: if you send a pair of shoes to opposite ends of the universe, and you open your box and see a left shoe, you instantly know the other box has the right one. But that doesn’t mean anything was communicated at that moment. The outcome was always complementary — it’s just revealed when you open the box.
Or, imagine you have two balls, and you paint one red and the other blue, randomly assign them to boxes, and send each box across space. When one person opens their box and sees a red ball, they know the other must have the blue one. Again, no information was sent at the moment of opening. It’s correlation, not communication.
And in quantum entanglement, it’s even trickier — the particles don’t even have definite properties until they’re measured. But their correlation is preserved across any distance. Still, you can’t use that to send a message, can’t open your particle and somehow use the outcome to say, “I love you,” to someone across the universe — not instantly. Physics doesn’t allow it.
Jacobsen: But people get romantic about it — they hear “spooky action at a distance” and imagine they can send a vibe, or a thought, or some kind of cosmic feeling, and the other person will just know.
Rosner: I don’t know exactly what they think, but it’s a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics. It’s not cosmic telepathy. It’s mechanics. The rules of how the universe behaves at the quantum scale. And it’s weird, sure — but it doesn’t break causality. And there are a bunch of things — many of them unexpected — that pop out if you’ve never dealt with quantum mechanics before.
Jacobsen: Misunderstandings make people ripe for plucking and pilfering by bad actors.
Rosner: I mean, no more than with any other kind of bullshit. America has been plucked and pilfered by the current guy-in-chief for more than four years now — and he doesn’t talk about quantum mechanics.
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