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Science

How Einstein Lost the Battle To Explain Quantum Reality (nature.com) 55

Long-time Slashdot reader lee1 shares "an interesting essay on the history of orthodoxy in quantum mechanics," published this week in Nature.

Its title? "'Shut up and calculate': how Einstein lost the battle to explain quantum reality." [T]he views of Danish physicist Niels Bohr came to dominate. Albert Einstein famously disagreed with him and, in the 1920s and 1930s, the two locked horns in debate. A persistent myth was created that suggests Bohr won the argument by browbeating the stubborn and increasingly isolated Einstein into submission. Acting like some fanatical priesthood, physicists of Bohr's 'church' sought to shut down further debate. They established the 'Copenhagen interpretation', named after the location of Bohr's institute, as a dogmatic orthodoxy.

My latest book Quantum Drama, co-written with science historian John Heilbron, explores the origins of this myth and its role in motivating the singular personalities that would go on to challenge it. Their persistence in the face of widespread indifference paid off, because they helped to lay the foundations for a quantum-computing industry expected to be worth tens of billions by 2040...

The Einstein-Bohr dispute raised larger issues, according to the article. "What is the purpose of physics? Is its main goal to gain ever-more-detailed descriptions and control of phenomena, regardless of whether physicists can understand these descriptions? Or, rather, is it a continuing search for deeper and deeper insights into the nature of physical reality?

"Einstein preferred the second answer," the articcle notes — and concluded that quantum mechanics was incomplete: Unlike Bohr, Einstein had established no school of his own. He had rather retreated into his own mind, in vain pursuit of a theory that would unify electromagnetism and gravity, and so eliminate the need for quantum mechanics altogether. He referred to himself as a "lone traveler". In 1948, U.S. theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer remarked to a reporter at Time magazine that the older Einstein had become "a landmark, but not a beacon".

Subsequent readings of this period in quantum history promoted a persistent and widespread suggestion that the Copenhagen interpretation had been established as the orthodox view... When learning quantum mechanics as a graduate student at Harvard University in the 1950s, US physicist N. David Mermin recalled vivid memories of the responses that his conceptual enquiries elicited from his professors, whom he viewed as 'agents of Copenhagen'. "You'll never get a PhD if you allow yourself to be distracted by such frivolities," they advised him, "so get back to serious business and produce some results. Shut up, in other words, and calculate."

The book argues that actually the physics world suffered from "a subtly different kind of orthodoxy" — an indifference to "foundational questions" outside the mainstream — but that the "myth" motivated projects and experiments.

"Although the wider physics community still considered testing quantum mechanics to be a fringe science and mostly a waste of time, exposing a hitherto unsuspected phenomenon — quantum entanglement and non-locality — was not..."
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How Einstein Lost the Battle To Explain Quantum Reality

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  • I can't wait to hear the expert comments for this story. *squee!*

    • inexpert observation:

      There are realms where quantum mechanics doesn't work, but Einstein's GR does....sure, vice versa too but the point is Einstein made something amazing that endures with time. Gravity might NOT be a quantum phenomenon, and our Standard Model can't handle gravity neither can our quantum field theories that came later.

      We had LIGO first detecting colliding black holes via gravity waves for not even 9 years yet.... a century after Einstein published GR. holy shit!

    • by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Sunday April 28, 2024 @08:46PM (#64431680) Homepage
      I have to say, I never heard the purported

      persistent myth was created that suggests Bohr won the argument by browbeating the stubborn and increasingly isolated Einstein into submission.

      Bohr did say "quit telling God what to do" in response to Einstein's oft-repeated statement "I don't believe that God plays dice", but that's hardly "browbeating." (Einstein's phrase term, in the oldest version of this was "Der Alte würfelt nicht:" the old one doesn't dice.)

      Einstein made some very cogent arguments, most notably the elucidating the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox, that quantum mechanics can't be a locally real description of physics. Unfortunately, the Copenhagen interpretation simply explained all the experimental results, and the experimental results just kept matching quantum mechanics to as many decimal places as anybody could measure.

      The amusing thing is that EPR -- what Einstein (with Podolsky & Rosen) pointed out as "absurd" -- also matched experimental results, the weirdness turns out to be a key insight critical to understanding quantum mechanics, and is pretty much the basis for all of quantum computing these days.

      • "The amusing thing is that EPR -- what Einstein (with Podolsky & Rosen) pointed out as "absurd" -- also matched experimental results,"

        Thus, is there actually a law of non-contradiction in nature?

        • Bellis inequality seemingly discredited Einsteins EPR. In recent time it has been propsed that ER explains instantaneuos action, due to micro wormholes.
          Im no expert, but its pretty convincing evidence to me.

          • Bellis inequality seemingly discredited Einsteins EPR.

            To the contrary. Bell's inequality [wikipedia.org] theorem showed that EPR was indeed inherent in quantum mechanics, couldn't be explained away by any hidden-variable theory... and (with the Aspect experiment [wikipedia.org]) was experimentally verified.

            Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen's analysis was spot on: quantum mechanics really did predict that. Einstein's only flaw was thinking that the result was absurd.

            • "Einstein's only flaw was thinking that the result was absurd."

              Is it not absurd that spooky action at a distance removes locality and causality from particle behavior?

              • "Einstein's only flaw was thinking that the result was absurd."

                Is it not absurd that spooky action at a distance removes locality and causality from particle behavior?

                Certainly seems absurd! The only problem is, it is experimentally correct.

      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        The persistent myth was created by physicists who would tell their students not to work on the foundations of QM because Bohr and his ilk had the answers. It wasn't a myth you would have heard outside of physics. And until recently, there was definitely a bias against doing anything on the foundations of QM. Now that that QM and its, heir String Theory, have reached their limits, it is becoming recognized that without new foundational work, progress will not be made. The "shut-up and calculate crowd" never

        • The persistent myth was created by physicists

          No it wasn't.

          who would tell their students not to work on the foundations of QM because Bohr and his ilk had the answers. It wasn't a myth you would have heard outside of physics.

          It wasn't heard inside of physics, either. Yes, I'm a physicist.

          And until recently, there was definitely a bias against doing anything on the foundations of QM.

          If by "foundations of quantum mechanics" you mean addressing the question "what does it mean?", you're right, physicists mostly addressed that question only in long discussions in the bar. But the "bias" was practical, not conceptual: quantum mechanics worked. Do the calculations, get the answers, compare them to measurements. "Foundations" questions never seemed to give you any way to do experimental confirmations. They were alway

    • Re:*Grabs popcorn* (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sfcat ( 872532 ) on Sunday April 28, 2024 @09:22PM (#64431722)

      QM and the interpretation discussed in the article has never really been proven. You will get people pointing at the electro-weak force predictions and how accurate it is. The problem is that that theory is the result of a giant human powered regression (that's the shut up and calculate part). Using a regression has two consequences. One it will given you an accurate answer even if the hypothesis is incorrect. Two, you learn nothing about the underlying phenomenon. Thus the accuracy of the electro-weak theory isn't the proof of QM that is often claimed. Truth is, we still don't really know if QM is correct. And there is growing reason to think it is wrong. If it makes you feel any better, Einstein probably wasn't right either. It was the 3rd interpretation by Dirac (pilot wave theory) that seems to be the best interpretation but since we haven't really explored that theory since the late 1940's there is a lot of work to do to prove that interpretation.

      PS On a forum with plenty of physicists, that isn't a good attitude. Given all the kluges currently in use in cosmology, I'm not sure it is reasonable to think we are on the right track currently.

      • Apparently, people get confused about the distinction between reality and a mathematical model. A mathematical model provides predictions about reality, but it isn't necessarily reality. Asking which model is correct isn't the right question; asking which has more predictive power is a better question.
      • QM and the interpretation discussed in the article has never really been proven.

        exhaustively shown to be correct by experiment. The interpretations of quantum mechanics, on the other hand, aren't susceptible to experimental tests.

        You will get people pointing at the electro-weak force predictions and how accurate it is.

        You're a little confused here. Electro-weak unification fits within the framework of quantum mechanics, but no more and no less than everything fits within the framework of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is just the tool by which you make the calculations.

        To suggest whether quantum mechanics is correct, you need an alternative hypothesis, one that explai

        • "exhaustively shown to be correct by experiment."

          What about the "worst prediction in the history of physics"? Why does quantum mechanics predict that dark energy should be 10^120 times greater than observed?

          • "exhaustively shown to be correct by experiment."

            What about the "worst prediction in the history of physics"? Why does quantum mechanics predict that dark energy should be 10^120 times greater than observed?

            What, vacuum energy? It's only a "worst prediction" when you try to fold general relativity into QED. Without Einstein's field equation, in QM vacuum energy is irrelevant, since only differences in energy are measurable.

  • by cirby ( 2599 ) on Sunday April 28, 2024 @05:07PM (#64431392)

    The scientific method is great, but too many scientists have stopped worrying about science so much, and more about getting published.

    There's nowhere near enough people out there who actually check the results from the work that's being done. You don't get a big grant from checking a major paper and confirming that they did the math and science right - or finding out that they fudged the results a bit.

    Peer review only works as long as the peers actually review.

    We need a lot of people who will go over research with the same intent and focus as auditors go over tax accounting ledgers.

    Retraction Watch is doing a lot of that, but they can only do so much.

  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday April 28, 2024 @05:11PM (#64431402)

    Only by clueless idiots. QC tech has massively overpromised and massively underdelivered for something like 40 years now and _still_ has no practical uses at all. There is absolutely no reason to expect this to change and no reason to expect this technology to ever amount to anything.

    • i.e. show me, don't tell me
      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Indeed. "The grander the claims, the more pathetic the reality" applies here. Other current tech "revolutions" where that is true are crapto and "AI", while "VR" is already mostly over. Again.

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      > There is absolutely no reason to expect this to change and no reason to expect this technology to ever amount to anything.

      Come on, that's premature. QC shows hints of promise, but may take longer to tame than expected. Fusion energy could be the same way. We are making incremental progress in Fusion, and if the trend continues, we'll eventually hit the break-even point in roughly 15 to 30 years (more large-scale energy out than in.)

      With QC, they find ever better ways to clean up the "quantum noise" ove

  • U.S. theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer remarked to a reporter at Time magazine that the older Einstein had become "a landmark, but not a beacon".

    Oppenheimer helped create beacons that destroy landmarks.

  • ChatGPT

    Herbert Marcuse, a critical theorist associated with the Frankfurt School, offered a critique of science within the context of his broader critique of modern industrial society. Marcuse argued that science, as practiced in contemporary society, often serves the interests of domination and control rather than liberation and human flourishing. He identified several key points of critique:

    Instrumental Rationality: Marcuse argued that science, especially in its technological and applied forms, tends to p

    • Now let's see your ChatGPT equally compelling Maxist and Feminist critiques of science.

      • How many bridges and aqueducts that have stood the test of time did the Romans build while thinking heavier things fell faster than lighter things?

        What if you can be very wrong and still build things like an atomic bomb?

        • Well, drop a lead ball and a feather and see what happens... ;)
          • Wouldn't Roman engineers be lowering or sliding big and little blocks in the course of their construction activities, and observing they moved at the same speed and making unconscious operational adjustments to accomodate reality, no matter what the textbooks said?

            What if something like that is occurring with the Law of Non-Contradiction, where we find ways around it in quantum mechanics (hiding contradictions within vectors, for example), and definitely find ways around it in politics?

    • I shut down my brain when I heard “Frankfurt School” and Critical theory”

      I live I. Germany and I actually lost a job in Frankfurt a few weeks ago because of this one problem they Germans have.

      They theorize all the time and do not actually produce results. The company went down because the software team was meta planning in multiple 8 person meetings how to plan the management of the tea:. It took 5 WEEKS to build a single page on an app to upload a single file,
      In a system that will

      • Ain't capitalism efficient, amirite? Would a strong basic income help at all? (PS Having been a casualty of dot-com, can I say I feel your pain?)

        • Much as Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried, and that the Americans can be counted on to do the right thing after trying everything else... Capitalism is the worst way of managing real world resource allocation, except for all the others that have been tried.
          • "Capitalism is the worst way of managing real world resource allocation, except for all the others that have been tried."

            How come the native americans of the west left the gold in the hills and ate heartily enough from salmon runs that were so thick you could walk across the Columbia River on them?

            Is the real tragedy of the commons that privatization enclosed it, taking away our freedom not to cooperate, nonviolently, with markets, as much as possible?

            How come there was no tragedy of the commons in the amer

            • "Capitalism is the worst way of managing real world resource allocation, except for all the others that have been tried."

              How come the native americans of the west left the gold in the hills and ate heartily enough from salmon runs that were so thick you could walk across the Columbia River on them?

              Is the real tragedy of the commons that privatization enclosed it, taking away our freedom not to cooperate, nonviolently, with markets, as much as possible?

              How come there was no tragedy of the commons in the american west before the privateering anglos got there? Is capitalism some kind of disease that destroys a natural spirit of sharing land?

              Oh, please! https://allaboutbison.com/buff... [allaboutbison.com]

            • The noble savage myth is bullshit. They warred, they destroyed habitats and moved on... They simply lacked the technology (and this population) to do it on the kind of scales we do it today.

      • The actual problems we Germans have is that we tend to copy all the bad habits existing in the USA and this is a prime example.

        Creating fast growing startups and paying wages that would rather be at home in Silicon Valley is as un-German as it gets.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Support for these types of questions is rare in science. To be honest, there's only one funder that seems to actually give out money to work on issues like quantum foundations - the Foundational Questions Institute (www.fqxi.org) and they're kinda small to put it lightly.

    If you apply to the national science foundation or department of energy or whatever and ask for a grant to work on this you're lucky to get beyond a referee report that says (in essence) "LOL, no. No tech in 5 year timeframe, no grant".

  • I'm looking for an excellent explanation of the arguments, merits & flaws of each, hopefully distilled into just a few paragraphs, made as simple as possible but not simpler

  • Personally I think entanglement is evidence that we are living in a simulation. Perhaps particles A and B are references to one object. The implementation details were never supposed to "leak".
  • Dirac's view (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AntisocialNetworker ( 5443888 ) on Monday April 29, 2024 @02:46AM (#64432062)

    Dirac (who might be presumed to know something about this subject) says in his Lectures on Quantum Mechanics that "entanglement" is a result of viewing an electromagnetic wave (with say slant polarization) as the sum of two particles with orthogonal polarizations, the result of resolving the wave into two components with vertical and horizontal polarization. That's to say it's an artifact of taking the wave model for the transfer of electromagnetic energy that Maxwell's equations produce, and hammering it into a ballistic model based on particles - that conversion can handle momentum fine, and reduce the horrendous maths of interacting waves, into a simple Newtonian mechanical system, but at the cost of losing any means of carrying information about polarization, so the need to invent two particles to provide an X-Y coordinate system to resolve it.

    To those with a Newtonian cannonball, all physics problems look like ballistics.

  • As Tim Maudlin [wikipedia.org] intimates in his books on the philosophy of physics (see the bibliography in the Wiki page), the major difference between Bohr (and Heisenberg) and Einstein, is that the former were anti-realists while Einstein was a scientific realist.

  • by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Monday April 29, 2024 @05:30AM (#64432260) Homepage Journal

    If you can't make useful predictions within the parameters of your model, you can't test the ideas. Ergo, the shut up and calculate side does have a good argument.

    Previously, in physics, there has been a three-way dance between theorists who develop the mathematical description, theorists who develop the mechanical description, and practical physicists who carry out observations both to test the theories and to apply them in practical terms. This dance kept everything moving.

    This may or may not be the correct way to approach quantum mechanics. The rules are very different in that domain.

    On the other hand, it's easy to spot the hostility between the groups and it's obvious that the anticipated new physics isn't getting found. New models are rare and are struggling. The dance hasn't completely stopped, but it is definitely in trouble.

    But, of course, that might equally be down to the increased competition, the need to publish trivial results quickly rather than do anything profound, and the greatly reduced investment in blue sky science.

    I'm going to suggest it's a mix of stuff. We need a lot more funding, a lot less aggro, and we either need to get the mechanical description partner back on their feet or we need to find an alternative to them if that sort of description just doesn't work in this arena.

    But I think the science dance needs three sides. I think we're going to find that the calculate lobby can't advance a whole lot further on their own, and that they cannot produce a theory of everything without some idea of what an everything is.

    • There is a big problem with "shut up and calculate". We have an incomplete theory that so closely approximates reality, it's error term is attributed to experimental error.

      The problem is that it is complex math that most physicists struggle with and so simply accept the dogma of its underlying theory. This has led to a tenacious view of reality that prevents anyone except "fringe science lunatics" from exploring the nature of space. It has become obvious that clinging to a Newtonian view of space is remi
  • Both Bohr and Einstein had valid points. Einstein was correct in saying the universe is deterministic, but calculations would need to take into consideration the state of everything in the universe and this is obviously impossible. Bohr advocated a mathematical model based upon statistics that provides a practical tool that so closely approximates reality, it is often confused with absolute truth.

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