19 October 2010

Inspiration: Linked Destinies

It can be quite striking when something mundane or technical is explained with a sense of the beautiful.

In the Fall issue of the Paris Review, Michel Houellebecq talks about the inspiration for his second novel, The Elementary Particles (or Atomised):
the experiments of Alain Aspect in 1982. They demonstrated the EPR paradox: that when particles interact, their destinies became linked. When you act on one, the effect spreads instantly to the other, even if they are great distances apart.
I like that.

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