L’Engle, Love and Physics
In Madeleine L’Engle “A Wrinkle In Time”, the story’s scholarly protagonist Meg Murry confronts an emotional struggle with cosmic repercussions. In the recent film adaptation, we hear Meg’s physicist-mother suggest:
“Think about quantum entanglement — two electrons once bonded together in love, if you will, suddenly separated by a galaxy but somehow still just as connected.”
The foundation of the story relies upon this metaphorical premise, through which L’Engle sought to suggest that spiritual beliefs and quantum physics were not mutually exclusive. Respecting the (younger) target audience, the film lightly touches on these concepts to create a plot vehicle through which the imaginative and visually striking events play out: Meg’s father mysteriously disappearing through folded space followed by her adventure conducting his search and rescue.
In our everyday lives we directly experience the physics of stability (statics), movement (kinetics), heat (thermodynamics)and light (optics). As such, most people find the rules of Newton’s “Classical Physics” intuitive and obvious. Many properties of “Quantum Physics”, on the other hand, are quite the opposite —counter-intuitive and esoteric. Quantum entanglement is an observable phenomenon with properties that one might say cross into the realm of magical. In fact, Einstein famously expressed skepticism toward entanglement as “spooky action at a distance”.
Is Love “spooky action at a distance”?
In A Wrinkle In Time, we are told “Love is always there, even if you can’t feel it! It’s always there for you!”
Love
While I defer to people like
for pragmatic meditations on Love, the emotion as expressed in this movie falls closer to the over-the-top romantic love that was a central theme in a guilty-pleasure of mine: How I Met Your Mother, where the show’s narrator and central character Ted Mosby once spoke of love:“If you’re looking for the word that means caring about someone beyond all rationality and wanting them to have everything they want no matter how much it destroys you, it’s love. And when you love someone you just, you…you don’t stop, ever. Even when people roll their eyes, and call you crazy. Even then. Especially then. You just– you don’t give up. Because if I could just give up…if I could just, you know, take the whole world’s advice and– and move on and find someone else, that wouldn’t be love. That would be… that would be some other disposable thing that is not worth fighting for.”
Love powers at least two forces critical to L’Engle’s story:
- as the Kryptonite for the cruel antagonist “IT”
“To love is to be vulnerable; and it is only in vulnerability and risk — not safety and security — that we overcome darkness.” - and as a crucial component to travel by folding spacetime, termed “tessering” (derived from the word “tesseract”).
“Meg knew all at once that Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witerspoon) , Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), and Mrs. Which () must be near, because all through her she felt a flooding of joy and of love that was even greater and deeper than the joy and love which were already there.”
The linkage to quantum entanglement relates to the tessering.
Physics
Meg’s father is working in his lab on cracking how to harness quantum entanglement to travel vast distances across the universe. His research now focuses on discovering a particular frequency that can serve as a carrier wave for such travel. Taking a pause from his work, he watches as Meg’s mother gently cradles and soothingly sings to the young Charles Wallace Murry. Inspiration strikes, he adjusts some knobs, his equipment surges to life and whoosh — he vanishes.
We imply from this scene the discovered frequency relates to that moment’s strengthening of the bond between mother and child: Love.
Quantum entanglement emerges experimentally in the EPR paradox (named for Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen) where a pair of particles imprint a “memory” upon each other that — no matter their separation in spacetime — reveals itself on the other when one is measured. This seems to defy accepted universal limits such as nothing (including information) traveling faster than the speed of light. A physical example used in “Entanglement Made Simple” by MIT’s Frank Wilczek helps frame the concept:
If I put each member of a pair of gloves in boxes, and mail them to opposite sides of the earth, I should not be surprised that by looking inside one box I can determine the handedness of the glove in the other.
The crux of this metaphor comparing quantum entanglement and love is the formation of something shared between two things that remains durable over the subsequent experiences of each over time and distance. Independent of the extent to which these may enable teleportation or the folding of spacetime, the observation of this shared connection remains profound.
To Love and to Be Loved
This is love in the abstract and as a property, however — a force that drives us, as Ted Mosby describes. In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari suggests emotions such as love may be deeply complex and subtle algorithms derived over the ages to encourage behaviors favorable to evolutionary survival and prosperity. While the imprinting of this bond and the awareness of that feeling are essential, we impact the world far more in how we act toward those we love.
Love counters the power of the emptiness and cruelty of L’Engle’s IT. Beyond the feeling of Love, love inspires us to care for our well-being (that we be better for others) and to express ourselves to those we love through extension of our company, our thoughts, our patience, our advice, our encouragement, our empathy and the myriad of choices we make in each day we live in light of their consequences on not only ourselves, but our partner and family — and even pets. Meg Murry overcomes a self-inflicted doubt and loathing to save the universe by saving herself — rediscovering the love she has been given and holds the power to give.
As the universe that composes us may entangle matter in ways we cannot see and we poorly understand, we entangle ourselves with others and harness the strength of these connections to form an alliance to counter life’s doubt, difficulties, loneliness, cruelty and challenges. The trust underlying such entanglement empowers us to mutually devote our efforts, our ideas, our compassion and harvest precious moments of fortifying growth, peaceful contentment, patient kindness and graceful joy across the span of a lifetime.
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