Assessment of Einstein’s Views and Contributions

Andrew Whitaker

In this last chapter I shall attempt a very brief assessment of the Bohr–Einstein debate. Who won it in the view of the audience? Who actually had the better case? I will also ask two rather more specific questions. The first is ‘Have the contributions of John Bell favoured the position of either of the protagonists?’ The second is ‘Has the dramatic arrival and progress of quantum information theory anything to tell us about the Bohr–Einstein debate?’ To help to answer these questions, let me first re-assemble a few points, putting together in turn an argument for each of the protagonists against a rather hostile critic. First Bohr, and I take as his critic John Bell himself. Bell was prepared, in fact, to give Bohr great credit for what Bell called the pragmatic approach to quantum theory, which I discussed earlier. This approach says that the world must be divided into ‘classical’ and ‘quantum’ parts, with an arbitrarily placed cut between them; that the macroscopic measuring device must be described in classical terms, but that we should not expect to picture the ‘quantum’ system in physical terms, and should be content just to possess rules of calculation that work well. But Bell regarded Bohr's philosophy of what lay behind pragmatism, complementarity , as ill-defined, unsatisfactory and bizarre.

F Laudisa

The book focuses on the epistemological and foundational dimension of the thought of Albert Einstein, who devoted some deep – but largely underrated – papers to the analysis of crucial issues in the philosophy of science. The analysis of the Einsteinian texts is then compared to his view of physical thought and also to some open problems in the epistemological foundations of quantum mechanics, a theory that Einstein contributed to construct but toward which he always manifested a deeply critical stance by the conceptual point of view.

Jagdish Mehra

Ulrich Eckern, Friedrich W. Hehl

Patrick H. Byrne

Summary Albert Einstein's attitude towards quantum mechanics—and statistical physics in general—was a puzzle to many of his contemporaries, and has remained a puzzle to the present. Though he made many significant contributions to statistical physics, he continually refused to regard that branch of science as fundamental. The present essay demonstrates that his attitude towards statistical physics was formed during his earliest investigations—between 1901 and 1903. In particular, it is shown that in Einstein's view, statistical laws are based upon non-statistical (causal) assumptions. This view influenced much of his later thinking. A few illustrations are offered, concluding with a discussion of his opposition to quantum mechanics.