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Cambridge University Press eBooks

Bohr on EPR

Guido Bacciagaluppi, Elise Crull

Published Nov 14, 2024• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this chapter, we dive deeply into Bohr’s views on (in)completeness and (non)locality. Perhaps the most outspoken and famous respondent to EPR, Bohr is generally thought to be obscure in his reply. We analyse it afresh (at least to our satisfaction), in particular in regard to its argumentative structure, the role of Bohr's examples and that of his 'non-mechanical disturbance'. We also assess its limitations as a reply to Einstein's wider concerns.

DOI
10.1017/9781139028493.007

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In this chapter, we dive deeply into Bohr’s views on (in)completeness and (non)locality. Perhaps the most outspoken and famous respondent to EPR, Bohr is generally thought to be obscure in his reply. We analyse it afresh (at least to our satisfaction), in particular in regard to its argumentative structure, the role of Bohr's examples and that of his 'non-mechanical disturbance'. We also assess its limitations as a reply to Einstein's wider concerns.
Recent work on Bohr's reply to EPR has helped improve our understanding of Bohr's reply, but further work is needed. In this paper I do two things towards that end. First, I make some elementary points about EPR's argument, which help to clear the air of some minor criticisms of Bohr's reply. Second, I argue that Bohr's thought experiment is a reasonable realization of EPR's argument, and I briefly suggest how to understand that experiment. I finish with a brief remark about Bohm's version of the experiment, and its relation to Bohr's.
The article offers a rereading of Bohr’s reply to the argument of A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen (EPR) concerning the incompleteness, or else nonlocality, of quantum mechanics. Bohr shows EPR’s argument to be deficient on their own terms, by virtue of an ambiguity found in their application of the criterion of reality they propose to the phenomena in question. He also offers an alternative interpretation of the EPR experiment itself, the thought experiment proposed by EPR, as part of his overall interpretation of quantum mechanics as complementarity.
Abstract The 1935 Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) paper, “Can Quantum–Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?”, stands as a landmark in the foundational debates over quantum mechanics. While the paper has since become one of Einstein’s most cited works, it initially received little attention, and the feature of non-locality, which was central to the argument in the paper, was largely neglected for decades. In this paper, I offer two reasons for this early neglect of non-locality in the immediate aftermath of EPR. First, early responses to the EPR paper defended the completeness of quantum mechanics by reformulating the thought experiment the authors had presented, thereby obscuring the feature of quantum mechanics the authors had wished to highlight. Bohr’s influential reply, for instance, substituted the specific thought experiment presented by EPR with the two-slit experiment, thus suppressing the entanglement between spatially separated systems. A second reason for the marginalization of non-locality was the tendency to see Einstein’s critique of quantum mechanics as proceeding from a commitment to determinism, though this in fact played no role in the EPR paper or in his later writings and correspondence. This paper argues that the failure to recognize non-locality was partly a result of the rhetorical manoeuvring by EPR’s critics, but also to a broader philosophical climate dominated by concerns over determinism, which effectively eclipsed all other conceptual issues, Only with Bell’s theorem in the 1960s did non-locality return as a serious focus of foundational inquiry.
After summarising a previously given analysis of Bohr's reply to Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR), this chapter endorses the claim made by Everett himself that Everettian quantum mechanics `in a certain sense bridges the positions of Einstein and Bohr'. On the one hand, it shows how Everett's theory provides a reconstruction of Bohr's viewpoint of complementarity as applied to the EPR case and a justi�cation of his criticism of EPR's `criterion of reality'. On the other hand, it includes a notion of physical reality that is independent of any observational context, and suggests a remaining shortcoming of Bohr's reply.
The chapter discusses Bohr’s response to the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen criticism of quantum mechanics, illuminating the clash between Bohr’s approach, firmly grounded in the existing experimental context, and Einstein’s prescient philosophical concerns. Given its accord with Ernst Mach’s influential double-aspect philosophical view, Bohr’s broader philosophical argument reads as a conventional piece of philosophical thought aimed at further clarifying the account already produced by the inductive process.