For millennia, the concept of an omniscient God — a deity who knows every sparrow that falls, every thought that forms, and every star that burns across the vast expanse of the cosmos — has boggled the human imagination. How in the world can any entity, no matter how supreme, know everything that’s happening everywhere, all at once, in real time, and with atomic-level intimacy?
To the strict materialist, it sounds like an impossibility, a wondrous but completely illogical relic of ancient philosophies and religions. Yet, when one plumbs the depths of modern physics, one discovers something utterly profound: The concept of divine omniscience is not just plausible; its mechanism is woven into the very fabric of spacetime.
This deeply mysterious mechanism is called quantum entanglement. It was first acknowledged in 1935 by physicists Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen; verified theoretically in 1964 by physicist John Stewart Bell; and validated experimentally in 1972 by physicists John Clauser and Stuart Freedman.
Two objects — for example, subatomic particles — that are intimately related and then widely separated somehow maintain an invisible, intimate and unbreakable connection. One object might be in a lab on Earth and the other might be clear across the universe, billions of light-years away, yet whatever happens to one is known and felt by the other instantaneously, without any delay whatsoever.
Einstein was none too pleased with quantum entanglement because it violates a sacred principle of his theory of special relativity: Nothing — not even information — can travel faster than the speed of light. He mocked the idea that two widely separated objects could communicate infinitely fast, calling it spukhafte Fernwirkung, German for “spooky action at a distance.”
Even though he was ultimately proven wrong both theoretically and experimentally, Einstein was right to call quantum entanglement spooky. To this day, the instantaneous signals passing between entangled objects are like nothing we can explain. They’re something totally different from radio waves and light signals.