spooky action at a distance
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.50 in modern English
37
Scrabble Score
23
Letters
3
Syllables
12
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "The correlations are thus due either to entanglement, as predicted by quantum physics, or to some hypothetical spooky action at a distance whose speed we wish to bound from below."
- "Of course, such a correlation is in principle possible to explain without any spooky action-at-a-distance: simply assume that the “particle” really is a particle, with a definite location at all times, and about half the time the particle goes to the right and half the time it goes to the left."
- "Once one is lead down this path, it is inevitable to conclude that spooky action at a distance occurs in nature. On the other hand, if one eschews the ontological interpretation of the wave function, then “action at a distance” is, at best, descriptive of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics. One must be extremely wary of extending such inferences to physical reality itself."
Etymology
Calque of German spukhafte Fernwirkung. Coined by Albert Einstein in a letter to Max Born on March 3, 1947 to express his skepticism about quantum mechanics, where two particles may interact instantaneously over a distance.