For over 100 years now, quantum mechanics has rattled the cage of everything we’ve believed we know about physics. Is everything just made of wiggles and waves if you look close enough? How far can one entanglement be stretched—is it long enough to enable quantum telecommunications around the world?
And those questions don’t let up when it comes to reality, or realism. We know that a quantum particle doesn’t have a true state until it is observed (à la Schrödinger’s cat), but the question behind that fact persists for all things in existence—does an object still have properties when those properties are not being observed?
At a certain point, this foundational question becomes... well, entangled... with an additional concept called locality. Locality describes whether or not an object is influenced by more than its own immediate physical surroundings. If larger or more complex forces are at play, that could affect principles like causality and even free will. Albert Einstein’s iconic description “spooky action at a distance” is about the opposite of locality. Even gravity is not action at a distance—it’s now described as a result of overlapping force fields of many sizes.
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