I began at 5 AM from the Broomfield Aloft hotel, strategically situated in a sterile “new urban” office park cum apartment complex along the connecting freeway between Denver and Boulder. The whole weekend was fucked in a way: colleges across Colorado were moving in for a Monday start, half of Texas was here already, and most of Colorado planned to head north to the zone of totality. I split off I-25 around Loveland and had success using US 85 northbound through Cheyenne. Continuing up 85 was the original plan, but that fell apart when 85 came to a crawl in the vast prairie lands of Wyoming. I dodged south and east, then, (dodging will be a continuing theme) and entered Nebraska’s panhandle with middling traffic.
I achieved totality on schedule north of Scottsbluff. And it was spectacular. A few fellow adventurers were hanging out along the outflow lane of an RV dump at a state recreation area. One guy flew his drone around a bit. Maybe he wanted B roll for other purposes. I got out fast, but not fast enough, and dodged my way through lane closures designed to provide access from feeder roads. The Nebraska troopers were great, I should add, always willing to wave to us science and spectacle immigrants. Meanwhile, SiriusXM spewed various Sibelius pieces that had “sun” in their name, while the Grateful Dead channel gave us a half dozen versions of Dark Star, the quintessential jam song for the band that dates to the early, psychedelic era of the band.
Was it worth it? I think so, though one failed dodge that left me in a ten mile bumper-to-bumper crawl in rural Nebraska with a full bladder tested my faith in the stellar predictability of gravity. Gravity remains an enigma in many ways, though the perfection of watching the corona flare around the black hole sun shows just how unenigmatic it can be in the macroscopic sphere.
But reconciling gravity with quantum-scale phenomena remains remarkably elusive and is the beginning of the decades-long detour through string theory which, admittedly, some have characterized as “fake science” due to our inability to find testable aspects of the theory. Yet, there are some interesting recent developments that, though they are not directly string theoretic, have a relationship to the quantum symmetries that, in turn, led to stringiness.
So I give you Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind’s suggestion that ER = EPR. This is a rather remarkable conclusion that unites quantum and relativistic realities, but is based on a careful look at the symmetry between two theoretical outcomes at the two different scales. So how does it work? In a nut shell, the claim is that quantum entanglement is identical to relativistic entanglement. Just like the science fiction idea of wormholes connecting distant things together to facilitate faster-than-light travel, ER connects singularities like black holes together. And the correlations that occur between black holes is just like the correlations between entangled quanta. Neither is amenable to either FTL travel or signaling due to Lorentzian traversability issues (former) or Bell’s Inequality (latter).
Today was just a shadow, classically projected, maybe just slightly twisted by the gravity wells, not some wormhole wending its way through space and time. It is worth remembering, though, that the greatest realization of 20th century physics is that reality really isn’t in accord with our everyday experiences. Suns and moons kind of are, briefly and ignoring fusion in the sun, but reality is almost mystically entangled with itself, a collection of vibrating potentialities that extend out everywhere, and then, unexpectedly, the potentialities are connected together in another way that defies these standard hypothetical representations and the very notion of space connectivities.