Do you remember Vivian Vance, Lucy’s friend on “I Love Lucy”? Vivian was crazy and trouble-prone, but not to the extent of Lucy. As such, Vivian served as a literary foil for Lucy. Her presence (Lucy! You can’t do that!) highlighted Lucy’s defining characteristics. A foil highlights (by contrast or comparison) the qualities of another central character. 

In the tavern scene of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the enormous tough man was a foil for the girlfriend of Indiana Jones. She outdrank him. Then she, in turn, served as a foil for Jones (Harrison Ford). As tough as she was, Jones was tougher. Then in the sequel, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” in a stroke of cinematic genius, instead of finding another foil for Indiana, they instead used him as a foil for his father (played by Sean Connery). 

How about “Frazier”? The two brothers were foils for each other. 

Foils highlight. And none other than Albert Einstein served as a foil to highlight the inconceivable, mind-boggling strangeness of modern quantum physics.

Einstein ushered in the 20th century with his own mind-boggling discoveries:

• Light is neither just a particle nor just a wave, but both — simultaneously.
• Nothing can go faster than the speed of light (seven times around the Earth in a second).
• If an eastbound train and a westbound train are approaching the station at 50 mph, how fast are they approaching each other? 100 mph is the obvious answer. It took Einstein to realize the obvious answer is not the correct one.
• As an object’s speed increases, its length decreases, its mass increases, and its time moves more slowly.
• Gravity bends a light beam passing an object.
• Gravity, stranger than Newton described, affects time. Essentially, matter tells space how to bend, and space tells matter how to move. (See a graduate physics course for details.)
• Forget what you learned in junior high, matter and energy are not distinct categories. Instead, take a little matter, stir in the speed of light, stir it in again, and you’ve just made (a lot of) energy. 

It took the imagination and open-mindedness of Einstein to conceive these bewildering results. His cognitive nimbleness stood him head and shoulders above other scientists. 

But with quantum physics, Einstein met his match. As the saying goes, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine.” 

Einstein, serving as foil, described quantum physics as “spooky.” What was he objecting to? Read on. 

One claim of quantum physics is that it is impossible to know both the exact velocity and the exact position of a particle. It’s not just that we don’t have precise enough instruments; it is theoretically impossible to exactly determine both. Why?  To find the position, you have to observe it; to observe it, you have to shine light on it. And photons of light energize the particle, affecting its velocity. Thus, by observing something, we affect it. So all we can know is its probable location (like a weather forecast).

That inherent probability-of-nature bothered Einstein, thus claiming that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” He pictured a pool table. If you hit two balls simultaneously with the cue ball, then, using conservation of momentum, knowing the velocity of the cue ball and of one of the struck balls allows you to determine the exact velocity and position of the second ball. 

Einstein reasoned the same technique could be done with atomic particles. Hit a particle so that it breaks into two pieces, moving apart. Then by measuring the velocity of one of the moving pieces, even though you altered it, you can use conservation of momentum to exactly determine the velocity of the other piece. 

Neils Bohr said, “Nope.” The two pieces are mysteriously connected via “quantum entanglement.” Observing one piece instantly affects the velocity of the other piece as well. 

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However, this “spooky action at a distance” does not let useful information travel faster than the speed of light, so Einstein’s claim that nothing goes faster than the speed of light still holds (sort of).   

Though inconceivable to Einstein, this spooky action has now been experimentally verified. In fact, predictions of quantum physics, accurate to one part per trillion, are the most precise in science, and are relied upon for much of modern technology, including GPS, MRIs, and the computer on which you are reading this column.

Mind-boggling, but true.  

— Community Columnist Tim Pennings is a resident of Holland and can be contacted at timothy.pennings@gmail.com. Previous columns can be found at timothypennings.blogspot.com.