Spooky Action at a Distance

Einstein called this "spooky action at a distance" and it was the latest shot in a 3000-year-long back and forth dispute in science. The dispute is over a principle called "locality" which, more or less, means that the universe works by direct physical influence - you affect things by effectivelytouching them with matter or energyrather than through instantaneous, "magical" influences.

But according to George Musser, a science writer and Contributing Editor to Scientific American magazine, in the last 60 years, more non-local "spooky actions" have been found. And he says that researchers are now finding ways to understand these observations as signs of a deeper view on what actually makes up space-time. Mr. Musser's new book exploring this idea is calledSpooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time - and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything.