By now, everyone has heard of “spooky action at a distance” and probably know that Albert Einstein was the chief skeptic about quantum mechanics, calling it a “ghost.” 

Except he wasn’t. 

What he wrote to Max Born in March of 1947 he referred to spukhafte Fernwirkung - a ghostly long-term effect, which is not really the same thing as a spooky action. Spook is a Dutch word, and relatively new, there is no record of it before the early 1800s, and given Dutch etymology it was a noun rather than an adjective. Ghouls, ghasts, ghents, ghours, and goblins are all basically the same thing, so it was likely another term for goblin. Germans instead had Spuk but while it means ghost today, it long meant more like “palaver” - to talk a lot about nothing of importance. 

Undestanding the context of language of 100 years ago matters.

Einstein had been critical of quantum entanglement and the implied bigger meaning since 1927. For all that time, 20 years, he didn't use the term spukhafte, yet that is what is now associated with concerns about real physics versus the metaphysics kind. In popular culture media accounts, they imply later experiments paint him as a clueless old guy who just didn’t understand complex maths. 

That is not at all accurate, though. Quantum mechanics was treated critically by him and others because of what John von Neumann called "probability dependencies" that defied classical mechanics. Erwin Schrödinger called it quantum mechanics in 1935 but Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen had noted the flaws in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle earlier and stated that the famous “Copenhagen interpretation” couldn’t be a scientific theory because it violated ‘local’ realism. 

That’s a much different thing than Einstein saying it was supernatural because he didn’t understand it, as people often believe now. 

Fellow Nobel winner Niels Bohr said Einstein and other critics were wrong in their concerns and later experiments (e.g. Bell’s Theorem in 1964) were interpreted as proving Einstein wrong but that was not so. Einstein instead stated, and rightly so, that instead of spooky action at a distance, there is no action at all, the universe instead works toward conservation of improbability. 

He thought quantum mechanics was a “beautiful idea” but the metaphysics attached to it was not. Yet spooky action at a distance resonated with people. It was a great example of the language of folklore and Halloween shaping how people perceive science.

Excerpted from Halloween Science 2.0, out now.

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