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AIP conference proceedings

Essential Ambiguity and Essential Influence: Rereading Bohr’s Reply to EPR

Arkady Plotnitsky

Published Jan 1, 2006• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The article offers a rereading of Bohr’s reply to the argument of A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen (EPR) concerning the incompleteness, or else nonlocality, of quantum mechanics. Bohr shows EPR’s argument to be deficient on their own terms, by virtue of an ambiguity found in their application of the criterion of reality they propose to the phenomena in question. He also offers an alternative interpretation of the EPR experiment itself, the thought experiment proposed by EPR, as part of his overall interpretation of quantum mechanics as complementarity.

DOI
10.1063/1.2158725

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The article offers a rereading of Bohr’s reply to the argument of A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen (EPR) concerning the incompleteness, or else nonlocality, of quantum mechanics. Bohr shows EPR’s argument to be deficient on their own terms, by virtue of an ambiguity found in their application of the criterion of reality they propose to the phenomena in question. He also offers an alternative interpretation of the EPR experiment itself, the thought experiment proposed by EPR, as part of his overall interpretation of quantum mechanics as complementarity.
The article considers the implications of the experiment of A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen (EPR), and of the exchange (concerning this experiment) between EPR and Bohr concerning the incompleteness, or else nonlocality, of quantum mechanics for our understanding of quantum phenomena and quantum probability. The article specifically argues that in the case of quantum phenomena, including those involved in the experiments of the EPR type, the probabilistic considerations are important even when the predictions concerned can be made with certainty, due to the impossibility, in general, to repeat any given quantum experiment with the same outcome. The article argue that this fact, not properly considered or taken into account by EPR, makes it difficult and ultimately impossible to sustain their argument, which it is consistent with Bohr’s counterargument to EPR and with his view of quantum phenomena and quantum mechanics.
Abstract The 1935 Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) paper, “Can Quantum–Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?”, stands as a landmark in the foundational debates over quantum mechanics. While the paper has since become one of Einstein’s most cited works, it initially received little attention, and the feature of non-locality, which was central to the argument in the paper, was largely neglected for decades. In this paper, I offer two reasons for this early neglect of non-locality in the immediate aftermath of EPR. First, early responses to the EPR paper defended the completeness of quantum mechanics by reformulating the thought experiment the authors had presented, thereby obscuring the feature of quantum mechanics the authors had wished to highlight. Bohr’s influential reply, for instance, substituted the specific thought experiment presented by EPR with the two-slit experiment, thus suppressing the entanglement between spatially separated systems. A second reason for the marginalization of non-locality was the tendency to see Einstein’s critique of quantum mechanics as proceeding from a commitment to determinism, though this in fact played no role in the EPR paper or in his later writings and correspondence. This paper argues that the failure to recognize non-locality was partly a result of the rhetorical manoeuvring by EPR’s critics, but also to a broader philosophical climate dominated by concerns over determinism, which effectively eclipsed all other conceptual issues, Only with Bell’s theorem in the 1960s did non-locality return as a serious focus of foundational inquiry.
This study posits that Bohr failed to defend the completeness of the quantum mechanical description of physical reality against Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen’s (EPR) paper. Although there are many papers in the literature that focus on Bohr’s argument in his reply to the EPR paper, the purpose of the current paper is not to clarify Bohr’s argument. Instead, I contend that regardless of which interpretation of Bohr’s argument is correct, his defense of the quantum mechanical description of physical reality remained incomplete. For example, a recent trend in studies of Bohr’s work is to suggest he considered the wave-function description to be epistemic. However, such an interpretation cannot be used to defend the completeness of the quantum mechanical description.
After summarising a previously given analysis of Bohr's reply to Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR), this chapter endorses the claim made by Everett himself that Everettian quantum mechanics `in a certain sense bridges the positions of Einstein and Bohr'. On the one hand, it shows how Everett's theory provides a reconstruction of Bohr's viewpoint of complementarity as applied to the EPR case and a justi�cation of his criticism of EPR's `criterion of reality'. On the other hand, it includes a notion of physical reality that is independent of any observational context, and suggests a remaining shortcoming of Bohr's reply.
The first round of the Einstein–Bohr debates took place when Einstein challenged Bohr’s principle of complementarity at the Solvay conference in 1927 and Bohr successfully defended it. The most serious challenge, however, came in 1935 when a paper by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) argued that quantum mechanics was incomplete through a gedanken experiment motivating an approach based on hidden variables. In this chapter, EPR’s arguments about the incompleteness of quantum mechanics and Bohr’s reply to them are presented. The ultimate answer came almost 30 years later, almost ten years after Einstein’s death, and was nothing that Einstein would have expected. Bell’s inequality and the subsequent Bell-CHSH inequality, that are satisfied by all theories based on the “self-evident truths” of reality and locality are discussed. The startling results that quantum mechanics violates Bell’s inequality and the experimental results are in agreement with the prediction of quantum mechanics are presented.