question, he or she could answer identically. The solution was simple—
prevent the spouses from communicating with each other. These precau-
tions were taken—each spouse was (discreetly) searched for
communication devices and questioned in separate rooms. Still, when
each was asked the same question, the answer given by each spouse was the
same!
What could explain this? There are two possibilities that seem to require
belief in phenomena not currently addressed by science. The first possi-
bility is that husband and wife possess a sort of intuition—not an explicit
means of communicating, but a knowledge of how the other would an-
swer the question. After all, many husbands and wives have the ability to
complete each other’s sentences.^9 The second possibility is that the mar-
riage is really more than just a uniting, but rather a welding; husband
and wife are, in this situation, one. We see the husband and the wife as
separate individuals, but with regard to questions asked by pollsters, they
are a single entity—to ask a question of one is to ask a question of the
other. This differs from the idea of “intuition” in that in the case of intui-
tion, the husband and wife are individual entities who answer the ques-
tions identically because they know how the other would answer them. A
subtle difference, but a difference nonetheless.
Entanglement and the Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen Experiment
Many quantum mechanical properties are similar to the wave-particle
dilemma faced by photons—until an observation or a measurement is
made, the property exists in a superposition of several different possibili-
ties. One such property is the spin around an axis. A photon may spin to
the left or to the right around an axis once that axis is selected and the
photon observed, but it will spin to the left 50 percent of the time and
to the right 50 percent of the time, and do so randomly. This is clearly
similar to the responses to poll questions of the inhabitants of Lower
Wobegon.
When a calcium atom absorbs energy and later returns to its initial
state, it emits two photons whose properties parallel the responses to poll
questions of husbands and wives in Lower Wobegon. The photons are
said to be entangled—the result of the measurement of the spin of one of
the photons automatically determines the result of the measurement of
the spin of the other, even though initially neither photon possesses spin,
but only a probability wave that allows for left and right spin equally. At
least, that is a viewpoint that is largely accepted by physicists.
Albert Einstein was extremely uncomfortable with this point of view,
60 How Math Explains the World