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Sophia An African Journal of Philosophy

Is Quantum Mechanics a Complete Theory?: A Philosophical Defense of Einstein's Position

U O Egbai

Published Aug 24, 2007• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen published their thought experiment I a paper entitled, “Can Quantum – Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be considered complete?”. At that time, Bohr, Heisenberg, and the proponents of the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum mechanics, were saying that Quantum theory is a complete and the last theory in physics event though it does not provide any picture of the world separate from our observations of it. The message Einstein conveyed to his colleagues was that the quantum theory is not a “complete” theory because it does not describe certain important aspects of reality which are physically real event if they are not observed. In sympathy with Einstein's position, this paper argues that, the real nature of physical reality cannot be explained “at once” by a single theory. Reality is still unfolding and a new theory that will surpass the predictive ability of Quantum Mechanics will soon emerge. SOPHIA: An African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 8 (2) 2006: pp.14-19

DOI
10.4314/sophia.v8i2.38726

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In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen published their thought experiment I a paper entitled, “Can Quantum – Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be considered complete?”. At that time, Bohr, Heisenberg, and the proponents of the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum mechanics, were saying that Quantum theory is a complete and the last theory in physics event though it does not provide any picture of the world separate from our observations of it. The message Einstein conveyed to his colleagues was that the quantum theory is not a “complete” theory because it does not describe certain important aspects of reality which are physically real event if they are not observed. In sympathy with Einstein's position, this paper argues that, the real nature of physical reality cannot be explained “at once” by a single theory. Reality is still unfolding and a new theory that will surpass the predictive ability of Quantum Mechanics will soon emerge. SOPHIA: An African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 8 (2) 2006: pp.14-19
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.
In 1935 Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) published an important paper [17] in which they claimed that the whole formalism of quantum mechanics together with what they called "Reality Criterion" imply that quantum mechanics cannot be complete.That is, there must exist some elements of reality that are not described by quantum mechanics.There must be, they concluded, a more complete description of physical reality behind quantum mechanics.There must be a state, a hidden variable, characterizing the state of affairs in the world in more details than the quantum mechanical state, something that also reflects the missing elements of reality.Under some further but quite plausible assumptions, this conclusion implies that in some spin-correlation experiments the measured quantum mechanical probabilities should satisfy particular inequalities (Bell-type inequalities).The paradox consists in the fact that quantum probabilities do not satisfy these inequalities.And this paradoxical fact has been confirmed by several laboratory experiments in the last three decades.The problem is still open and hotly debated among both physicists and philosophers.It has motivated a wide range of research from the most fundamental quantum mechanical experiments through foundations of probability theory to the theory of stochastic causality as well as the metaphysics of free will.
ASPECTS OF THE DEBATE The debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein concerning the interpretation of quantum mechanics extended from the fifth Solvay Conference in 1927 until the end of Einstein's life. The most dramatic exchange occurred in 1935, when Einstein, in collaboration with B. Podolsky and N. Rosen, published a paper in Physical Review entitled “Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?”, concluding with a negative answer, and Bohr replied in the same journal, with a paper of the same title but giving a positive answer. Their arguments were restated, in some respects with greater clarity, in the Library of Living Philosophers volume on Einstein in 1949. The disagreements between Bohr and Einstein concerned not only the physical question expressed in the common title of their papers, but also philosophical questions about physical reality and human knowledge. Much light was thrown upon the Bohr–Einstein debate by the theorem of J. S. Bell (1964) and the experiments which it inspired. Bell showed that any physical theory which applies to a pair of spatially separated systems (as considered in the thought experiment of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen) and satisfies a certain locality condition will, in certain circumstances, disagree statistically with quantum mechanics. Consequently, the supplementation of the quantum mechanical description envisaged by Einstein and his collaborators (usually referred to as a “hidden variables theory”) must either violate the locality condition or clash with quantum mechanical predictions.
Based on a thought experiment the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper’s authors concluded that in quantum mechanics the mathematical objects called wave functions fail to describe the physical reality and consequently quantum theory is incomplete. They left open the question of whether or not a complete description of the physical reality exists, but expressed their belief that such a complete theory is possible. In this paper I show that indeed a theory that gives a complete description of the physical reality exists.
In 1935 Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) published an important paper in which they claimed that the whole formalism of quantum mechanics together with what they called "Reality Criterion" imply that quantum mechanics cannot be complete. That is, there must exist some elements of reality that are not described by quantum mechanics. There must be, they concluded, a more complete description of physical reality behind quantum mechanics. There must be a state, a hidden variable, characterizing the state of affairs in the world in more details than the quantum mechanical state, something that also reflects the missing elements of reality. Under some further but quite plausible assumptions, this conclusion implies that in some spin-correlation experiments the measured quantum mechanical probabilities should satisfy particular inequalities (Bell-type inequalities). The paradox consists in the fact that quantum probabilities do not satisfy these inequalities. And this paradoxical fact has been confirmed by several laboratory experiments in the last three decades. The problem is still open and hotly debated among both physicists and philosophers. It has motivated a wide range of research from the most fundamental quantum mechanical experiments through foundations of probability theory to the theory of stochastic causality as well as the metaphysics of free will.
In a complete quantum theory, one would construct it based on what we can observe in a system and operationally define in our universe. This philosophy goes back to some of the original ideals of quantum theory defined by W. Heisenberg, N. Bohr, and others as part of the Copenhagen school of thought. We argue in this letter that that if one wishes to construct a complete quantum field theory, that it is most natural to construct it based on a nonlocal theory of observable principles. If this interpretation is valid, then the one-particle nonrelativistic limit that recovers quantum mechanics would as well be dynamically nonlocal. In this interpretation we derive the nonlocal Schrödinger equation. We will as well demonstrate that the canonical position--momentum commutator and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle emerge from translation covariance.