I was recently reminded of the relation between action at a distance and the Uncertainty Principle both hard to explain in an article about Chien Shiung Wu.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, widely known and taught, maintains that it’s not possible to know simultaneously the position and momentum of an elementary particle.
Entanglement, termed spooky action at a distance, began as a thought experiment of Einstein. It was later proved by experiment designed by the Genius woman experimenter Chien Shiung Wu in 1949. In her experiment, twin photons form, racing in opposite directions from an annihilating electron-positron collision. As you measure the momentum of one photon you instantly know the fate of the other, no matter how far away it is. The fate of the second photon is known before information can be conveyed and must be deterministic. Thus action at a distance argues for determinism.
I was an ardent determinist as a teenager to the point where I didn’t buy people being responsible for their crimes, nor Shakespeare his sonnets. People didn’t deserve punishments nor rewards. It caused me to turn away from the Hebrew Bible which vehemently accepts free will, as in the Blessing and the Curse.
Courses and books I read in college especially quantum mechanics, which is probabilistic, converted me again to accept free will, in part. I later discovered a number of non quantum arguments as well. Now I’m somewhere in between. For example, in the arena of distant causes, you won’t find Shakespeare in any account of the formation of the solar system or its consequences. But you can find Shakespeare in the hard-won effort of a free-thinking person.
So I just asked Chat-GPT whether quantum entanglement proves determinism. Its answer was a resounding NO! That was even after I argued with it. And Chat-GPT invoked (or regurgitated) the statistical arguments I came across in college. But the reasoning was wrong on different scale. Even if entanglement is deterministic like a Newtonian pool table, it’s a single instance not a universal principle.