action at a distance

Home/Tag: action at a distance

String Theory

Speak to the children of Israel and you shall say to them that they shall make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments, throughout their generations, and they shall affix a thread of sky blue [wool] on the fringe of each corner." (Num. 15:38) At the end of the weekly Torah portion Shelach (Num. 13:1–15:41), Torah commands us to attached tzitzit, "tassels," to the four corners of the garment. Reading about the white and blue strings of the tzitzit brought back childhood memories of how I first invented a naïve form of the string theory. It was 1970, as I recall, and I was about 13 years old at the time. Growing up in Russia, alas, I didn’t have a Bar Mitzvah, so I wasn’t busy studying Torah or preparing for [...]

Global or Local?

And let them make me a Sanctuary that I may dwell among them (Ex. 25:8) In modern physics, there are two paradigms usually expressed as locality and nonlocality.  Theoretical physics was born when Isaac Newton published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, where he formulated his laws of motion and the universal law of gravity.  The law of gravity says that two masses attract each other proportionally to the product of their masses and inversely proportionally to the square of the distance between them. This law said nothing about the nature of the gravitational interaction, it did not explain the mechanism of this attraction at a distance.   Newton was bothered by the question of how one body can act on another body far removed from it with nothing in between, i.e., the notion of “action [...]

Archives

Categories

DON’T MISS A BEAT

Be the first to know when we publish a new post.

Go to Top