Spooky Action at a Distance

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a popular account of quantum entanglement that failed to mention Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” quote. That’s not surprising, because quantum mechanics is a notoriously difficult subject to communicate to the non-specialist. It needs all the memorable sound-bites it can get... especially ones that a layperson can relate to. If you saw an experiment in which an electron in one location seemed to know what another electron somewhere else was doing, then the word “spooky” might well spring to mind.

Part of the appeal of the quote is that “spooky” is a colloquial word, rarely encountered in serious writing. It’s quite a recent coinage, as you can see from the Google Ngram chart below. “Spooky” was virtually unknown before the 20th century, and its usage only really took off in the 1970s and 80s. When Einstein used it in a letter to Max Born in 1947, the word was still quite novel (you can view the original context here – it’s on page 158 of the original, on the left-hand-side of page 90 of the scanned PDF).

There’s a catch, however. Einstein’s letter is translated from German, and what he originally wrote was not “spooky action at a distance” but “spukhafte Fernwirkung”. The Ngram stats for spukhafte (or spukhaft) are different from spooky – the word was at the peak of its popularity around 1947, and its usage has declined since then. This led me to wonder if “spukhaft” might have a slightly different meaning from “spooky”.

Spooky comes from “spook”, which is an informal, rather playful term for ghost. The German word Spuk also means ghost, but as you can see from the chart it’s been around longer. The word occurs in the first scene of Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer (mentioned a few weeks ago in Fortean Opera)... a gloomy Gothic tragedy, which isn’t the sort of place you’d expect to find a childishly jolly term like “spook”. The Norwegian sailors, on hearing eerie voices emanating from the Dutchman’s ship, say: “Welcher Sang! Ist es Spuk? Wie mich’s graust!”... which is rendered in the English version as “What a song! Are they ghosts? I’m filled with fear!”

If “Spuk” simply means ghost, with no cosy Halloween or Scooby-Doo overtones, that makes me wonder if “spukhaft” is better translated as “ghostly” rather than “spooky”. If so, it would place a somewhat different emphasis on the Einstein quote. If you say something is “spooky”, that’s not so much a description of the phenomenon itself, as your reaction to it – something is “spooky” if it makes you uneasy because you can’t explain it. On the other hand, if something is described as “ghostly”, that’s saying something about the phenomenon itself. It’s being labelled as supernatural, non-physical and possibly even irrational. For a scientist to refer to something in these terms is tantamount to saying it’s not real.

The closest idiomatic phrase I can think of would be “mystical action at a distance” rather than “spooky action at a distance”. If Einstein objected to “mystical action at a distance”, he wasn’t the first one. As I’ve mentioned before, this was the reason Galileo heaped ridicule on Kepler for his suggestion that the Moon was responsible for the Earth’s tides (see Galileo wasn’t always right...). Soon after Galileo’s time, Newton explained the tides—and the motion of the Moon and planets—as consequences of the gravitational inverse square law. On the face of it, this was nothing more or less than “action at a distance”, and many people objected to Newton’s theory on the metaphysical grounds that action at a distance was illogical and therefore impossible. Numerous mechanical explanations of gravitation were put forward to try to get around the need for action at a distance.

My understanding of the German language is only marginally better than non-existent, so I really don’t know what Einstein meant by spukhafte Fernwirkung. He might have meant “spooky action at a distance” in the sense that English-speakers would understand the term – i.e. that he found the concept unsettling, if not downright scary, because it was seemingly supernatural. But I’m not convinced the emotive overtone of the word “spooky” was intended at all. He may just have been saying “I don’t believe in it, because I don’t believe in the supernatural”.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what Einstein meant. “Spooky action at a distance”, as the phrase is commonly understood, is a perfect description of quantum entanglement. Wittingly or unwittingly, Einstein gave quantum physics one of its most accessible memes, right up there with Schrodinger’s Cat, the Many-Worlds Interpretation and the God Particle.

Paranormal Shakespeare

Today, Shakespeare’s plays are the epitome of respectable mainstream culture, while all things paranormal are relegated to the crackpot fringe. Aspiring authors who want their books to be studied in the hallowed halls of English Literature would be well advised to steer clear of tales of ghosts, witches, demons and sorcery. Such topics are a sure sign of lowbrow fiction, aren’t they? But the plays of Shakespeare are anything but lowbrow, and they’re packed full of tales of ghosts, witches, demons and sorcery.

Shakespeare was the archetypal Renaissance Man. He was a contemporary of Galileo and Francis Bacon, the pioneers of the scientific method, and also of John Dee – the most famous occultist in English history. As Shakespeare’s most famous character, Hamlet, said: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. Horatio’s philosophy was Humanism – the precursor of modern Skepticism. Shakespeare himself was more open-minded.

A previous post (More things in Heaven and Earth) described the pivotal role played by the paranormal in Hamlet. This is one of the most highly-regarded works of English literature, and yet the whole action of the play is set in motion by an encounter with a ghost. The apparition is seen by multiple witnesses, and it imparts information that later turns out to be true – although it couldn’t have been obtained by non-paranormal means (for more on the ghost in Hamlet, see The Ghost of Lulworth Cove on the Dark Dorset blog).

Hamlet isn’t the only work by Shakespeare where paranormal phenomena play a central role. In Macbeth, the title character is set on his road to power (and his ultimate downfall) by the prophecies of the three witches. Everything the witches predict during the course of the play comes to pass... although not always in the way Macbeth expects. The witches in Macbeth aren’t the evil Satan-worshippers of mediaeval imagination, but wise and superhumanly powerful women in the pagan tradition.

And that’s just the start of it. There are ghostly encounters in Julius Caesar and Richard the Third. There’s magic and sorcery in The Tempest, and midnight necromancy in Henry VI Part 2. There’s astrology and demonology in King Lear. There are paranormal-inspired high jinks in The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Comedy of Errors. And much more.

You can read all about Paranormal Shakespeare in a short ebook by myself that’s just been published by Bretwalda Books. It’s available from various places, including Amazon.com, Amazon UK, iTunes, Barnes & Noble and W H Smith.

200 Years of Forteana

This is the 200th post on the Forteana blog. That doesn’t mean it’s been running for 200 years (or even 200 weeks), but I still thought it would be fun to list a few highlights from the last two centuries of Forteana:

1813: Birth of Richard Wagner. Many years later (1980 to be precise), Roy Thomas used Wagner’s Der Ring Des Nibelungen as the story arc for issues 294 to 300 of The Mighty Thor – as recounted in A Wagnerian Thor.

1816: The Year Without a Summer, when Byron wrote his apocalyptic poem Darkness and Mary Shelley started work on Frankenstein.

1817: Birth of Hargrave Jennings, who went on to become an enthusiastic proponent of Phallicism – A Victorian Theology of Everything (see also Phascinating Phacts).

1819: The British Museum purchases its first ichthyosaur fossil, from a 20-year-old girl named Mary Anning – who, if legend is to be believed, was a rather dim-witted child until she was struck by lightning (see On the Diverse Benefits of being Struck by Lightning).

1821: Premiere of Weber’s opera Der Freischütz – a “pact with the devil” story and a classic example of Fortean Opera.

1827: Death of William Blake – artist, poet, mystic... and A 19th Century Contactee?

1829: The satirical artist William Heath produces a print entitled March of the Intellect, depicting what appears to be An Intercontinental Rapid Transit System.

1832: Birth of Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the pen-name of Lewis Carroll. His works for children (such as Alice in Wonderland) are still remembered today, while his books on mathematics are almost forgotten – see Sea Serpents, Logic and Lewis Carroll.

1844: The term Lisztomania is coined by the poet Heinrich Heine, to describe the hysterical behaviour of certain females in response to performances by Franz Liszt.

1847: The British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard explores the ruins of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, discovering among other things a huge wall carving depicting The Siege of Lachish – now on display in the British Museum (and the subject of an ebook by myself).

1848: The poet Tennyson, on a visit to Cornwall, sees King Arthur's Stone – which later inspires him to write Idylls of the King.

1856: Death of William Buckland: an early Fortean experimenter, who subjected a common piece of folklore—the idea of “toads trapped inside solid rock” —to practical test.

1861: Death of Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria, who was subsequently commemorated in the Albert Memorial... and The Frieze of Parnassus.

1871: The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell proposes a “thought experiment” involving one of the few demonic entities acceptable to modern science: Maxwell’s Demon.

1872: The German astrophysicist Karl Zöllner is the first person to suggest that the universe we live in may be non-Euclidean – a major step towards Inventing the Fourth Dimension.

1874: Birth of Charles Fort, who besides giving his name to this blog is the subject of a minor subdivision of imaginative literature – Charles Fort in Fiction.

1885: H. Rider Haggard produces his most famous novel, King Solomon's Mines – which includes an interesting take on the subject of Travellers from the Stars.

1887: Abbé Saunière embarks on a number of extravagant renovations to the church at Rennes-le-Chateau... including The Devil of Rennes-le-Chateau.

1895: Publication of The End of Books – a short story written by Octave Uzanne and illustrated by Albert Robida, containing a surprisingly prescient vision of iPods and audiobooks.

1896: Aubrey Beardsley produces an appropriately surreal illustration of “The Cave of Spleen” from Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock... complete with Angels in Machines.

1906: Birth of John Dickson Carr, one of the best (and most Fortean) mystery novelists of the 20th century – as described in A Trip to the Witches' Sabbath and Simulacra in fiction.

1909: Publication of The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster. With a century of hindsight, this can be read as a satire on social networking... and, with its firm insistence on “No Original Research”, a Wikipedia Prophecy.

1914: Socrates Scholfield of Providence, Rhode Island is granted U.S. patent 1,087,186 for a device to demonstrate the relationship between the Supreme Being and His Creation – The Double Helix of God.

1918: Publication of The Gate of Remembrance by Frederick Bligh Bond, revealing how his recent excavations at Glastonbury Abbey had been an exercise in Psychic archaeology.

1924: A British Air Ministry memorandum states that Germany is in possession of “an apparatus from which rays (or electric waves) can be projected to a height causing aeroplane engines to break down” – just one of many instances of Death Rays of the 1920s and 30s.

1926: Father Ronald A. Knox broadcasts an outrageously over-the-top comedy programme about rioting in London, which the press promptly hypes up into The First Radio Hoax.

1935: The May issue of Doc Savage magazine contains a painstakingly detailed description of a telephone answering machine, before such things even existed – an example of Futuristic gadgets of the 1930s.

1939: The first issue of a new pulp magazine, called Unknown, hits the stands in March. Complete in this issue is Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier: the first Fortean novel.

1942: An inscription bearing this date, in the cuneiform script of ancient Assyria, can be found in an underground mine-working in Wiltshire – The Bomb-Proof Museum.

1943: Accurately reported in an anonymous phone call on 25 May, but not actually occurring until 4 July – The Strange Death of General Sikorski.

1944: On 8 September, the first of more than a thousand V-2 rockets is launched against the city of London – as recounted in London versus the V-2 rockets (and also the subject of an ebook by myself).

1945: In December, five US Navy torpedo bombers go missing in the Bermuda Triangle, soon followed by a search aircraft looking for them. By August of the following year, paranormal explanations of The Mystery of Flight 19 are already being put forward.

1948: Time for another mystery – less well-known than the Bermuda Triangle, but arguably more intriguing – The Tamam Shud Mystery.

1950: Publication of Gerald Heard’s The Riddle of the Flying Saucers, the first non-fiction English-language book to deal with the subject... and one most people have never heard of. Read all about it in UFOs: the forgotten book.

1958: The second issue of Harvey Comics’ Race for the Moon contains a story by Jack Kirby entitled The Face on Mars ... thirty years before Mark Carlotto drew the world’s attention to that particular feature of the Martian landscape.

1960: As Che Guevara made a brief appearance at a rally in Havana, Alberto Korda took a quick photograph, which he later dubbed Guerrillero Heroico – The portrait with a life of its own.

1961: Three weeks after Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbits the Earth in Vostok 1, American astronaut Alan Shepard is lobbed three hundred miles downrange from Florida on the end of a 1953-vintage short-range ballistic missile, in history’s most blatant example of a Hyperbolic Orbit (“hyperbolic” in the sense of “greatly exaggerated”).

1962: The British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) holds its first meeting in September – as remembered with nostalgia in September 2012, marking Fifty Years of British UFO Research.

1965: The British science fiction author John Brunner writes a glowing piece in New Worlds magazine, drawing attention to a then little-known author by the name of Philip K. Dick – as recorded in Philip K. Dick - two early British viewpoints (see also John Brunner: a British Philip K. Dick?).

1968: The September/October issue of Flying Saucer Review contains, among other things, a circuit diagram for an electronic UFO detector that anyone who wants to can build for themselves.

1973: Uri Geller gives such a persuasive performance on the Dimbleby Talk-In that Professor John Taylor, brought in as a skeptical scientist, becomes a paranormal believer right there in front of the TV cameras. I chose this as the first of my five Fortean Events that Shook the World.

1981: Stephen Hawking and other prominent scientists convene at Castel Gandolfo, the Pope's Summer Residence, for a study week on Cosmology and Fundamental Physics organized by the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences – as described in Vatican Cosmology.

1992: Nick Pope, newly arrived at the UFO Desk in MOD Main Building, is interviewed by the MOD’s house journal (this was before anyone in the UFO community had heard his name). I kept the clipping for a few years, then threw it away – which is a pity, because it would probably be worth millions today (or maybe not). See Nick Pope at the MOD for this and more Popean anecdotes.

1997: At a meeting with a group of physicists and cosmologists, the Dalai Lama declares himself to be open-minded on the subject of alien encounters – as recounted in The Dalai Lama, quantum physics and UFOs.

2001: The European Space Agency sets up the ITSF (Innovative Technologies from Science Fiction) database – Novel space technologies from such great thinkers as Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.

2005: The original (and much missed) Hierophant made his last appearance in the January issue of Fortean Times. For the low-down on the over-educated, bad-tempered, humourless impostor who tried to take his place, see The Hierophant Mystery.

2006: The bizarre Da Vinci Code trial, presided over by a judge who clearly knew more about the subject matter of Dan Brown’s novel than the author himself did (and who embedded a code of his own in his final judgment) was the fifth and last of my Fortean Events that Shook the World.

2011: At the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow, the six-man crew of the MARS-500 mission enters orbit around the red planet after eight months in space... an echo in the real-world of the recurring sci-fi theme of Phony space missions.

2013: February sees two major announcements about DNA results – one of which is widely applauded while the other... isn’t. It’s all explained in Bigfoot, Richard III and Outsider Science.

The Frieze of Parnassus

The Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens isn’t London’s most popular tourist attraction. When it was erected in 1872 it was the height of fashionable good taste, but within a few decades it had become a symbol of bad taste... and has remained so ever since. Personally I love high Victorian Gothic architecture, but I know I’m in a minority so I won’t go on about it.

The central focus of the Albert Memorial is, of course, the huge seated figure of Prince Albert (the consort of Queen Victoria). But there are many other sculptures that deserve (but rarely get) close scrutiny. In particular there’s the Frieze of Parnassus that surrounds the base of the memorial. This depicts 160-plus historical figures from the world of the Arts. Although it’s not obvious from my photograph, each of the figures is identified by name – the Wikipedia article has clearer photographs and a full list of names.

When faced with lists like this, it’s inevitable that questions of the “why didn’t they include X?” variety spring to mind. Of course, the figures are necessarily drawn from the limited range of cultures familiar to mid-19th century Londoners – the ancient world of Egypt, Greece and Rome, and the post-renaissance world of Western Europe. In addition, the figures are limited to five specific categories – Poets, Musicians, Painters, Sculptors and Architects. But even within these constraints there are some notable omissions. I thought it would be interesting to go through all the people I’ve mentioned in previous posts who meet the basic criteria, and see which of them are included and which aren’t.

POETS

There aren’t as many poets depicted as you might expect. This is because they share the south side of the frieze (that’s the one in my photograph) with musicians.

Shakespeare is one of only three English poets to make it onto the frieze. He featured previously in connection with the authorship question and the ghost in Hamlet. If you’re interested in the latter, then watch this space – there’s more paranormal Shakespeare in the pipeline.

Alexander Pope (who featured in Angels in Machines last year) is a good example of someone who ought to be on the frieze but isn’t. The only post-Shakespeare English poet who does make the cut is John Milton, who was mentioned in passing in The Great Pyramid, and other British inventions – due to his rather nutty suggestion that the Greek philosopher Pythagoras got all his ideas from the ancient Britons. Oddly, Pythagoras appears on the frieze as a “poet” too, four places to the left of Milton.

Two of Britain’s greatest poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (featured in The Person from Porlock and The Ancient Mariner) and Lord Byron (featured in The Year Without a Summer) don’t make it onto the frieze, whereas Goethe and Schiller – two German poets of the same period – do.

Of the other non-English poets depicted on the frieze, Homer was featured in Space Odyssey and Dante in Dante’s Divine Comic Book.

MUSICIANS

Haydn, Mozart and Weber are the only three composers featured in Fortean Opera who died before the Frieze of Parnassus was created – and they are all on it.

Four of the composers mentioned in Philip K. Dick, music critic meet the same criterion – but only three of them are on the frieze. Bach, Mozart (again) and Beethoven made it, but Schubert didn’t.

PAINTERS

Botticelli, who featured in The Mystic Nativity, is conspicuously absent from the Frieze of Parnassus. This is odd because, as I said in that post, Botticelli “had a major influence on British painting of the Victorian period”. It’s even stranger that Botticelli’s more obscure contemporary Ghirlandaio is on the frieze.

Looking at the various omissions – Pope, Byron, Coleridge, Schubert, Botticelli – it strikes me they are all purveyors of what might be called “accessible” art. Maybe they weren’t considered sufficiently heavyweight to be commemorated in stone!

That’s certainly not true of the other great figures of the Florentine Renaissance—Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo—who are all there on the frieze. In fact Michelangelo makes two appearances, both as a painter and as a sculptor! Both Michelangelo and Leonardo were featured in The Da Vinci Code and medieval symbolism, with Michelangelo also cropping up in A sixteenth century dinosaur and Leonardo in Underground Art and Crashed UFO in London. Raphael featured in my post about The School of Athens (which also mentions Pythagoras, referred to earlier).

Bellini was the subject of Descent into Limbo, and Mantegna was also mentioned in that post. Both Bellini and Mantegna are shown on the frieze.

The only other Italian artist I remember featuring is Agostino Carracci, in Bacchus and Ariadne. If you look back at that distinctly R-rated post, you won’t be surprised to learn the Victorians didn’t include Agostino in their frieze. However, Agostino’s brother Annibale Carracci (mentioned in the same post) did make the cut.

Vermeer (who featured in Chasing Vermeer... and Charles Fort) isn’t on the frieze – possibly because he falls in the “too accessible” category. But I was pleased to see that Hogarth – the epitome of accessible art – is right up there on the Frieze of Parnassus. Hogarth featured in Paranormal investigation, 18th century style and Another historical myth-conception.

Turner (who featured in Enigmatic Art) is on the frieze, but needless to say his populist contemporary John Martin (featured in Art and Archaeology) isn’t. Incidentally, one of Martin’s most characteristic works is “Joshua commanding the Sun to stand still upon Gibeon” (1816). I recently came across another version of the same scene that Martin painted in 1848 in a more Turneresque style. They’re both reproduced here (1816 top and 1848 bottom) so you can decide which you like best (I think they’re both great pictures).

SCULPTORS

I can only remember mentioning a sculptor once – that was Donatello in Alien simulacrum, one of my very first blog posts. Anyway, Donatello is there on the Frieze of Parnassus.

ARCHITECTS

As far as the Frieze of Parnassus is concerned, the “architects” of the ancient world aren’t really architects but patrons of architecture – the people who commissioned the buildings, rather than the people who designed them (the identities of the latter being lost in the mists of time). So, for example, “Cheops” is depicted as the architect of the Great Pyramid. Interest in Egyptology was still relatively new when the Albert Memorial was built, and the great wave of pyramidiocy that swept over the English-speaking world came later (see The Great Pyramid, and other British inventions, already mentioned above).

One of the oddest inclusions is Sennacherib, who would have been best known in Victorian times as the villain of a popular poem by Lord Byron (who unlike Sennacherib didn’t make it onto the Frieze of Parnassus). Presumably Sennacherib was considered the “architect” of the city of Nineveh, which had only recently been unearthed by archaeologists when the Albert Memorial was built. Sennacherib was mentioned in my posts on The Bible's Excluded Middle, Gods of the Bible and The Siege of Lachish... the last being about my ebook of the same title (which will tell you all you need to know about Sennacherib, should you choose to buy it).