Einstein and quantum mechanics

Juan Pablo Paz

Albert Einstein made fundamental contributions to the development of quantum mechanics. However, he was never satisfied with the quantum worldview. In fact, during most of his life he attempted to find inconsistencies and paradoxes within quantum mechanics. His famous quote "God does not play dice" shows how disturbing was to Einstein one of the most important aspects of quantum mechanics: non-determinism. In this paper we will present the basic concepts of quantum mechanics, we will describe Einstein's attempts to destroy it and we will discuss why we can nowadays state that, in this regard, Albert Einstein was not right.

Max Jammer

Peter Mittelstaedt

After the discovery of quantum mechanics by Heisenberg and Schrödinger in 1925, Einstein raised again and again objections to this theory. Obviously, he had the impression that (a) quantum mechanics does not adequately grasp reality, that it is (b) based on probabilistic laws of nature and that it is (c) for this reason incomplete. Einstein must have obtained this impression from many presentations of quantum mechanics in the first decade after its discovery. -- However, technical refutations of Einstein's objections were not possible when these arguments were put forward, since the necessary formal tools were not yet available at this time. Instead, the advocates of quantum mechanics tried to disprove Einstein merely by intuitive and less rigorous arguments. -- In the light of current physics we find that the objections (a) and (b) are irrelevant since, in accordance with Einstein's intentions, quantum mechanics does refer to reality and is not based on probabilistic laws. Only the incompleteness argument is incorrect. However, for technical reasons a convincing refutation of this objection only became possible thirty years after its formulation and ten years after Einstein's death.

Max Jammer

Willy De Baere, Guillaume Adenier, Andrei Yu. Khrennikov +3 more

It is argued in this work that in order to explain the conflict between Bell's inequality (BI) and quantum mechanics (QM), it is neither necessary to give up the notion of Einstein locality (LOC), nor that of reality, as is done in some recent work. The definite existence of EPR's “elements of reality” is shown by using a result in a former thought experiment by M. Renninger. Einstein locality is saved by sticking to the failure of counterfactual definiteness (CFD) at the level of individual quantum processes.

Max Jammer