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arXiv:1008.2892

Einstein's Moon

Danhua Song

Published Aug 15, 2010• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

An account of the subjective elements of quantum mechanics or of whether, as Einstein famously asked, the Moon exists when nobody is looking at it.
DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1008.2892

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Abstract It must have been around 1950. I was accompanying Einstein on a walk from The Institute for Advanced Study to his home, when he suddenly stopped, turned to me, and asked me if I really believed that the moon exists only if I look at it. The nature of our conversation was not particularly metaphysical. Rather, we were discussing the quantum theory, in particular what is doable and knowable in the sense of physical observation. The twentieth century physicist does not, of course, claim to have the definitive answer to this question. He does know, however, that the answer given by his nineteenth century ancestors will no longer do. They were almost exactly right, to be sure, as far as conditions of everyday life are concerned, but their answer cannot be extrapolated to things moving nearly as fast as light, or to things that are as small as atoms, or—in some respects—to things that are as heavy as stars.

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We often discussed his notions on objective reality. I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it. A. Pais As O. Stern said recently, one should no more rack one's brain about the problem of whether something one cannot know anything about exists all the same, than about the ancient question of how many angels are able to sit on the point of a needle. But it seems to be that Einstein's questions are ultimately always of this kind. W. Pauli Pauli and Einstein were both wrong. The questions with which Einstein attacked the quantum theory do have answers; but they are not the answers Einstein expected them to have. We now know that the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks. The impact of this discovery on philosophy may have been blunted by the way in which it is conventionally stated, which leaves it fully accessible only to those with a working knowledge of quantum mechanics. I hope to remove that barrier by describing this remarkable aspect of nature in a way that presupposes no background whatever in the quantum theory or, for that matter, in classical physics either. I shall describe a piece of machinery that presents without any distortion one of the most strikingly peculiar features of the atomic world. No formal training in physics or mathematics is needed to grasp and ponder the extraordinary behavior of the device; it is only necessary to follow a simple counting argument on the level of a newspaper braintwister.
Abstract It must have been around 1950. I was accompanying Einstein on a walk from The Institute for Advanced Study to his home, when he suddenly stopped, turned to me, and asked me if I really believed that the moon exists only if I look at it. The nature of our conversation was not particularly metaphysical. Rather, we were discussing the quantum theory, in particular what is doable and knowable in the sense of physical observation. The twentieth century physicist does not, of course, claim to have the definitive answer to this question. He does know, however, that the answer given by his nineteenth century ancestors will no longer do. They were almost exactly right, to be sure, as far as conditions of everyday life are concerned, but their answer cannot be extrapolated to things moving nearly as fast as light, or to things that are as small as atoms, or—in some respects—to things that are as heavy as stars.