Einstein’s Pasta Riddle and Our (Non?)Local World

There is an interesting riddle from Einstein about what forces push or pull spaghetti into our mouth. Apparently we suck spaghetti by lowering air pressure in our mouth (measurements show that we can drop air pressure in our mouth by half). You can appreciate the local force appearing right near your lips as a combination from non-local outside-air-pressure forces acting on this thin string, no matter what is the shape or the length of that string. Take a minute to ruminate over the image above. How this puzzle is related to the deepest problems in physics like fields versus forces, our world locality versus quantum nonlocality, even to electrical circuits, where energy flows outside the wires at a speed of light, but electric current flows inside the wires slower than we walk, and voltage from a battery is magically transferred over distance to other circuit elements (resistors, capacitors, inductors)…?

Measuring forces is a local-to-a-point approach, but mapping potential difference between any pair of points in space provides potential/field perspective on where this force comes from. For example, gravitational force is nothing but time pressure (and not from imaginary spacetime curvature): Classical Physics Beyond Einstein’s explains that very clearly, even high school students can understand.

Read more in my free eBooks:

• 40-page “Classical Physics Beyond Einstein’s” PDF, on Amazon or Google Books
• 400-page “Time Matters” PDF, on Amazon or Google Books