Text: John Bell Proves Reality Is Non-Local "Contagious magic is based upon the assumption that substances which were once joined together possess a continuing linkage; thus an act carried out upon a smaller unit will affect the larger unit even though they are physically separated." ‹Sir James Frazer The essence of a local interaction is direct contact--as basic as a punch in the nose. Body A affects body B locally when it either touches B or touches something else that touches B. A gear train is a typical local mechanism. Motion passes from one great wheel to another in an unbroken chain. Break the chain by taking out a single gear an the movement cannot continue. Without something there to mediate it, a local interaction cannot cross a gap. On the other hand, the essence of non-locality is unmediated action-at-a-distance. A non-local interaction jumps from body A to body B without touching anything in between. Voodoo injury is an example of a non-local interaction. When a voodoo practitioner sticks a pin in her doll, the distant target is (supposedly) instantly wounded, although nothing actually travels from doll to victim. Believers in voodoo claim that an action here causes an effect there; that's all there is to it. Without benefit of mediation, a non-local interaction effortlessly flashes across the void. The unruly nature of unmediated action has moved physicists from Galileo to Gell-Mann to unanimously reject non-local interactions as a basis for explaining what goes on in the world. . . . Despite physicists' traditional rejection of non-local interactions, despite the fact that all known forces are incontestably local, despite Einstein's prohibition against superluminal connections, and despite the fact that no experiment has ever shown a single case of unmediated faster-than-light communication, Bell maintains that the world is filled with innumerable non-local influences. Furthermore these unmediated connections are present not only in rare and exotic circumstances, but underlie all the events of everyday life. Non-local connections are ubiquitous because reality itself is non-local. ‹Nick Herbert, "Quantum Reality"

See Also: SYMPATHETIC VIBRATION; SYMPATHETIC OSCILLATION

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