When Spooky Action at a Distance?

Albert Einstein famously said that quantum mechanics should allow two objects to affect each other's behaviour instantly across vast distances, something he dubbed “spooky action at a distance”¹. Decades after his death, experiments confirmed this.

How do you explain spooky action at a distance?

Quantum entanglement — or "spooky action at a distance," as Albert Einstein famously called it — is the idea that the fates of tiny particles are linked to each other even if they're separated by long distances.

When did Einstein say spooky action at a distance?

This principle, which physicists call locality, was long regarded as a bedrock assumption about the laws of physics. So when Albert Einstein and two colleagues showed in 1935 that quantum mechanics permits “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein put it, this feature of the theory seemed highly suspect.