QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

appreciated by Einstein, and he wrote about both theories in favourable terms, recommending
their creators for the Nobel Prize. In contrast, he considered Born’s statistical interpretation and
relativistic quantum theory to be worthless. Writing to Max Born in December 1926 he
expressed doubt about whether quantum mechanics, in spite of it being so very influential, was
actually ”the real thing”. An inner voice told him that regardless of its good sides, quantum
theory did not carry us any closer to ”the secret of the Old One… who does not play dice”.
Einstein never accepted Bohr’s complementarity interpretation. Writing to Schrödinger in 1928
he described Heisenberg’s and Bohr’s thinking as intelligently fabricated philosophy or a
sedative religious cushion which believers found it difficult to dispense with. 724 After the
dramatic encounter between Einstein and Bohr which took place in Brussels 20-25 October
1930, Einstein gave up trying to show that quantum mechanics is logically inconsistent. In the
second, American phase of the thirty year struggle between the two men, Einstein tried to show
that quantum predictions are inconsistent with any reasonable idea of reality. Bohr’s answer, in
effect, was "We have to revise our idea of reality". 725
If quantum theory is complete, the laws of nature are statistical, something that Einstein, who
was searching for laws of nature which were fully symmetrical, objective and deterministic, was
never able to accept. He did not wish to jettison traditional continuity and causality but presented
new thought experiments in which he attempted to show that Bohr’s interpretation of quantum
mechanics was incomplete. The best known of these was the EPR paradox presented in 1935 and
described in Section 4.3.4. of this thesis. Bohr succeeded in defending his point of view by
emphasising the indivisibility of quantum phenomena, the necessity of taking account of the
whole experimental situation, and complementarity. The continuing divergence of Einstein’s
concepts was however a source of acute discomfort to him. Bohr is known to have engaged in
discussion with Einstein in his mind until his death. Even though Einstein focused his powers on
the search for a unified theory, he never ceased pondering quantum theory and its interpretation.
He once said to his friend Otto Stern that he had spent a hundred times longer thinking about the
quantum problems than he had about the general theory of relativity. 726
Even though the discussions between the two men, which were in essence a dispute about the
completeness and consistency of quantum mechanics, did not usually directly touch basic
724 Pais 1991, 320.
725 J.A. Wheeler in Jahn (ed.) 1981, 87.
726 Pais 1982, 8.
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