Time&Eternity

150 chapter 3
inspiring”; it seemed to him “however, not the real thing”: “The theory says
a lot, but does not really bring us closer to the secret of the ‘old one.’ I, at
any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice.” 191
Above all, the epistemological interpretation that Werner Heisenberg
(1901–1976) and Niels Bohr (1885–1962) 192 gave to quantum theory between
1925 and 1927 was decisive for Einstein’s lifelong aversion to quantum mechanics.
193 The criticism that initially sounded so irreconcilable, however,
was mitigated by the discussions on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Experiment
of 1934, so that, in 1940, Einstein declared that the progress of the
century consists of two theories that are basically independent of each other,
namely, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. In his opinion, the
two theories do not actually directly contradict each other, but they also do
not appear to be suitable for merging into a uniform theory. 194 He sees the
fundamental difference between quantum theory and all previous theories
in the fact that, instead of a model description of actual events in time and
space being given, probability distributions are now being provided for the
dependency of possible measurements upon time. And this was not done
on the basis of imaginative flights of thought, but rather due to the compelling
power of empirical facts.
And Heisenberg has convincingly shown, from an empirical point of view, any decision
as to a rigorously deterministic structure of nature is definitely ruled out, because
of the atomistic structure of our experimental apparatus. Thus it is probably
out of the question that any future knowledge can compel physics again to relinquish
our present statistical theoretical foundation in favor of a deterministic one
which would deal directly with physical reality .l.l. Some physicists, among them
myself, can not believe that we must abandon, actually and forever, the idea of direct
representation of physical reality in space and time; or that we must accept the
view that events in nature are analogous to a game of chance. 195
Accordingly, Einstein considered quantum physics to be a logical and
consistent, though incomplete, description of a still unknown underlying
theory, which would finally achieve an objective description of reality. 196
This deep skepticism of Einstein indicates the extent to which quantum
physics challenged the established line of thinking that had been shaped to
look for deterministic structures of causality.
Time Getting Blurred—Quantum Theory
If the theory of relativity dealt with the very large and led us to the spatially
and temporally comprehensible “ends” of the universe, then quantum
theory takes us into the realm of the very small, into the world of atomic
nuclei and subatomic particles. 197 Important steps in the development of