A Cosmic Act

I wish I had invented the expression, "There was more of [such-and-such] than you could shake a stick at." It's so inclusive and cosmic, because if you've ever tried it you know that you can literally shake a stick at anything, even the entire rest of the universe! Plus it's a very cool thing to do anyway. It's harmless but meaningful.

I wonder how that expression came about, because today it's not common to shake sticks at things. But in the old days it must have been an act loaded with significance.

Now quantum physics has come into our lives, and it suggests that shaking a stick at something -- without touching it -- might indeed have more effect that we would ever have thought.

Consider this passage, from Bill Bryson's "A Brief History of Nearly Everything," p. 145:

[Subatomic] particles have a quality known as spin and, according to quantum theory, the moment you determine the spin of one particle, its sister particle, no matter how distant away, will immediately begin spinning in the opposite direction and at the same rate.

It is as if, in the words of the science writer Lawrence Joseph, you had two identical pool balls, one in Ohio and the other in Fiji, and the instant you sent one spinning the other would immediately spin in the opposite direction and at precisely the same speed. Remarkably, the phenomenon was proved in 1997 when physicists at the University of Geneva sent photons seven miles in opposite directions and demonstrated that interfering with one provoked an instantaneous response in the other.

You see the possibilities -- parallel universes for starters!