An Urdu translation of the landmark article by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen from the year 1935 is presented with the hope that it will be of academic and research interest to the readers in that language.
Roman Schnabel's article argues that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox can be resolved by identifying a flaw in what the author calls the "EPR implication" and by using radioactive alpha decay as an example showing that predictability does not exclude genuine randomness. The paper is clearly written and addresses an important foundational question. In our view, however, its main conclusion does not follow. The article narrows the original EPR argument, attributes too much to Bell-inequality violations, and replaces the central EPR structure - which involves incompatible observables and locality-based reasoning - with a simpler case of correlated random events. The result is an interesting interpretive remark, but not, we think, a satisfactory scientific resolution of the EPR problem.
More than 70 years after its publication, the article by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) [88] is still cited hundreds of times every year in the literature; this is a very exceptional case of longevity for a scientific article! There is some irony in this situation since, for a long time, the majority of physicists did not pay much attention to the EPR reasoning. They considered it as historically interesting, but with no precise relevance to modern quantum mechanics; the argument was even sometimes completely misinterpreted. Astriking example is given in the Einstein-Born correspondence [89] where Born, even in comments that he wrote after Einstein's death, clearly shows that he never completely understood the nature of the objections raised by EPR. Born went on thinking that the point of Einstein was a stubborn rejection of indeterminism (“look, Albert, indeterminism is not so bad!”), while actually the major concern of EPR was locality and/or separability (we come back later to these terms, which are related to the notion of space-time). If giants like Born could be misled in this way, no surprise that, later on, many others made similar mistakes! This is why, in what follows, we will take an approach that may look elementary, but at least has the advantage of putting the emphasis on the logical structure of the arguments and their generality. Doing so, we will closely follow neither the historical development of the ideas nor the formulation of the original article, but rather will emphasize the generality of the EPR reasoning.
This is a translation of Schr6dinger's three-part 1935 paper 1 in Die Naturzkissenschaften. Earlier that same year there had appeared the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen paper 2 (also famous in paradoxology) which, Schrodinger says, in a footnote, motivated his offering. Along with this article in German, Schrodinger had two closely related English-language publications.3 But the German, aside from its oneparagraph presentation of the famous cat, covers additional territory and gives many fascinating insights into Schrodinger's thought. The translator's goal has been to adhere to the logical and physical content of the original, while at the same time trying to convey something of its semi-conversational, at times slightly sardonic flavor.