Spooky Actions at a Distance?

Speaker: N. David Mermin. Oppenheimer Lecture Program at UC Berkeley. Einstein's real complaint about the quantum theory was not that it required God to play dice, but that it failed to "represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance." I shall use the rhetorical device of a computer-simulated lecture demonstration (a cartoon version of recent experiments in Vienna) to explain both the appeal of Einstein's criticism and the remarkable act that the "reality" he insisted upon is nevertheless unattainable.