This is my first attempt to communicate with the ChatGPT on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. ChatGPT reacted promptly with a good overview of this very wide topic. ChatGPT during our half hour conversation concluded that there is still room for the further development of the EPR paradox because this research field is far from the final theory. However, ChatGPT was skeptical to search for the missing element of the physical reality in papers of Old Masters working between 17th and 19th centuries. (One potential candidate for a more general physical theory of the EPR paradox can be found in the overlooked works of Old Masters working in the period of the 17th–19th centuries).
This is my first attempt to communicate with the ChatGPT on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. ChatGPT reacted promptly with a good overview of this very wide topic. ChatGPT during our half hour conversation concluded that there is still room for the further development of the EPR paradox because this research field is far from the final theory. However, ChatGPT was skeptical to search for the missing element of the physical reality in papers of Old Masters working between 17th and 19th centuries. (One potential candidate for a more general physical theory of the EPR paradox can be found in the overlooked works of Old Masters working in the period of the 17th–19th centuries).
The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox was enunciated in 1935 and since then it has made a lot of ink flow. Being a subtle result, it has also been largely misunderstood. Indeed, if questioned about its solution, many physicists will still affirm today that the paradox has been solved by the Bell-test experimental results, which have shown that entangled states are real. However, this remains a wrong view, as the validity of the EPR ex-absurdum reasoning is independent from the Bell-test experiments, and the possible structural shortcomings it evidenced cannot be eliminated. These were correctly identified by the Belgian physicist Diederik Aerts, in the eighties of last century, and are about the inability of the quantum formalism to describe separate physical systems. The purpose of the present article is to bring Aerts' overlooked result to the attention again of the physics' community, explaining its content and implications.
On 25 March 1935, the Physical Review received a paper from Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, with the title “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” A few days later, on 30 March 1935, I was born. My life with Einstein was off to a promising start. Some would call it an inauspicious start. Abraham Pais, for example, says in his otherwise admirable biography of Einstein [1] that “the only part of this article that will ultimately survive, I believe, is this last phrase [ No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this ], which so poignantly summarizes Einstein's views on quantum mechanics in his later years.” But today, in this centenary of the Einstein annus mirabilis, as the EPR paper and I both turn 70, it is, in fact, the most cited of all Einstein's papers [2]. The debate over its conceptual implications rages hotter than ever, and for the first time, practical (well, for the moment still gedanken practical) applications of the EPR effect have emerged in cryptography and in other areas of quantum information processing. Being only five weeks old, I was unprepared to pay attention to the article that appeared in the New York Times on 4 May 1935 under an elaborate set of headlines and subheads: And I was completely oblivious to the stern rebuke from Einstein himself, published three days later in the Times , which declared that “any information upon which the article … is based was given to you without my authority. It is my invariable practice to discuss scientific matters only in the appropriate forum and I deprecate advance publication of any announcement in regard to such matters in the secular press.” Apparently Podolsky had tipped off the Times to the article, which did not appear in the sacred press until the 15 May issue of Physical Review. It is not clear that Einstein ever forgave him, and I wish I had been old enough to send Podolsky a cross letter myself. Anyone growing up in America in the 1940s knew that the preeminent genius of our age, and perhaps of any other, lived in Princeton, New Jersey, had a predilection for baggy sweaters, and was always badly in need of a haircut—as far ahead of his time in dress and grooming as he was ahead in science during his 1905 annus mirabilis.
Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen pointed out that the quantum-mechanical description of “physical reality” implies an unphysical, instantaneous action between distant measurements. To avoid such an action at a distance, these three concluded that quantum mechanics had to be incomplete. However, its extensions involving additional “hidden variables,” allowing for the recovery of determinism and locality, have been disproved experimentally (Bell’s theorem). In this paper, an opposite solution of the paradox is presented, based on the greater indeterminism of the modern quantum field theory (QFT) description of particle physics, which prevents the preparation of any state having a definite number of particles. The resulting uncertainty in photon radiation has interesting consequences in quantum information theory (e.g., cryptography and teleportation). Moreover, since it allows for fewer elements of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) physical reality than the old non-relativistic quantum mechanics, QFT satisfies the EPR condition of completeness without the need for hidden variables. The residual physical reality never violates locality; thus, the unique objective proof of “quantum nonlocality” is removed in an interpretation-independent way. At the same time, the supposed nonlocality of the EPR correlations turns out to be a problem in interpretation of the measurement process. If we do not rely on hidden variables or new physics beyond QFT, the viable interpretation is a minimal statistical one, which preserves locality and Lorentz symmetry.
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.