‘Spooky action at a distance’ is now used to describe quantum entanglement. But forces, like gravity, appear in the form of action at a distance too. Are forces spooky too? Physics professor, Sverre Holm, journeys the occult origins of forces, and the mysteries still looming over modern science. 

Isaac Newton is well known for having added, "I frame no hypotheses" to the second edition of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1713, meaning that he could not explain the cause of gravitation.

Gottfried Leibniz’ view was that if such attraction at a distance is not explainable then it is a perpetual miracle, and added that it is “a chimerical thing, a scholastic occult quality.”

Leibniz’ dismissal is all the more strange in light of Newton’s seeming agreement with Leibniz. Newton himself had after all dismissed the medieval scholastics for their belief in substantial forms, like “sympathies” between similar objects. He had written that “to tell us that every Species of Things is endow'd with an occult specifick Quality by which it acts and produces manifest Effects, is to tell us nothing.”

How could Newton be so sure that his theory of gravitation did not fall under the category of such a scholastic form, and thus that Leibniz arguments were not valid?

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Newton called the presence of forces without an intervening medium an absurdity.

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In retrospect, we know that Newton was right and Leibniz wrong. The field concept, which plays such an important role in today’s physics, was well established by the end of the 19th century. Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell played major roles through their work with electric and magnetic fields. Mary Hesses’s classical book from 1961 is the definite guide to this history.

Action at a distance, sympathies, and tides