Can the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil cause a tornado in Texas? Edward Lorenz wondered this in a memorable lecture in 1972, and over the past four decades we have all come to terms with the answer.
Science is often like this: it traces phenomena that are seemingly abstract in their unraveling, yet tremendously concrete in their consequences. Among the countless examples of this seeming aporia, there is one in particular that I find myself coming to terms with; and not because I have decided to devote myself to theoretical physics, far from it, but because I find myself having to come to terms with it as an entrepreneur, even before I come to terms with it as a researcher.
This is the concept of “entanglement,” which more or less means “entanglement”; it is the concept that indicates the presence of a kind of loving entanglement between distant parts. The common thread between the flap of a butterfly’s wings and a tornado, indeed. A puzzle explicated by the great Erwin Schrodinger, Nobel Laureate in 1933 for his fundamental contributions to quantlst mechanics, which sent the classical conception of space and time to hell. Because, if it is true that between two cell parts the whole universe can be in the way, without affecting their ability to influence each other instantaneously, then time and space do not exist, they are only the product of my perception.
An aporia that Einstein himself called disturbing, because it is capable of putting an end to the concept of “locality,” a seemingly unquestionable property of reality, in its intrinsic ability to create not only a biunivocal correspondence between things and their location, but at the same time affirming that they always interact first with what is close to them.
The locality principle states that distances exist, yet à entanglement also exists, as countless experimental tests have shown. At Colgate University in New York, for example, physicist Enrique Gálvez has developed a device capable of “correlating” particles: a bit like simultaneously firing two coins into the universe, being certain that they will always, at the same instant, fall on the same side.
But what does this have to do with the life of an entrepreneur, with our life? Caught and perhaps lost in our own portion of reality, we look inward according to the principle of locality, placing schooling, health care, justice, public administration in circumscribed and disconnected boxes, uniting them, if anything, only through our experience as users, users, entrepreneurs. Yet each of these elements, as intuited by Shroedinger, is propulsive and instantly connected to the value chain.
The school stop and the re-organizational slowness of distance education? It will weigh 1.5 percent of world Pii. The loss of education, according to the OECD, will result in a lower level of skills, and the skills people have are directly related to their productivity, explained the study’s authors, who said the bill for economies will be even higher if the disruptions continue over the next year. “Although the magnitude of the negative consequences on the learning front is not yet known, existing research suggests that for students between the ages of 6 and 18, school closures caused by Covid could translate into about 3 percent lower earnings for their entire lives.”
The longer schools operate hiccups, the worse the consequences will be for the overall Pii. More efficient civil justice? Worth 2.6 billion euros, the estimate is contained in the biennial report of the Council of Europe’s Commission on the Efficiency of Justice (Cepej) and takes into account the money that would be saved by Italian companies by adding up the costs that companies incur as a result of delays in bankruptcy proceedings, more than a billion, those of delays in 1st and 2nd instance civil proceedings, amounting to another billion, and the bureaucratic costs related to bankruptcy proceedings alone, more than 500 million. If justice works it promotes growth: it is no coincidence that reform of time and procedures is on the list made by Europe in exchange for the Recovery fund. We are the slowest on the Continent, and in the South it is even worse. In southern regions, a civil case takes an average of 17 months, more than twice as long as in the North, where it takes eight months. Doesn’t this have an immediate effect on the livesof those who want to invest, those who might hire, those looking for work? Of course.
Of the centrality of health care functioning not only to health, but to a community’s ability to generate value, we are all too aware. We need only look up, even just a little, to touch à entanglement that unites the faces of a reality far more interconnected than we suspect. Two even very distant particles can affect each other instantaneously. All the more reason to stop cultivating only one’s own garden and change what needs to be changed with the courage of those who know they are living in an exceptional time
