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Bohr–Einstein debates

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The Bohr–Einstein debates were a series of public disputes about quantum mechanics between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. The debates started in 1927 at the 5th Solvay Conference.

Quotes

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  • To recap, I had four numbers to add together. If the total came to under 2, then Einstein’s version of quantum reality was correct and the world is deterministic, rather than probabilistic, with quantum entities existing prior to being observed. But if the total came to over 2, then Niels Bohr was right and there is no objective reality out there in the absence of measurement and the subatomic world is ruled by chance and probability. [...] So, sorry Einstein, victory goes to Bohr instead.
  • The discomfort that I feel is associated with the fact that the observed perfect quantum correlations seem to demand something like the ‘genetic’ hypothesis [identical twins, carrying with them identical genes]. For me, it is so reasonable to assume that the photons in those experiments carry with them programs, which have been correlated in advance, telling them how to behave. This is so rational that I think that when Einstein saw that, and the others refused to see it, he was the rational man. The other people, although history has justified them, were burying their heads in the sand. I feel that Einstein’s intellectual superiority over Bohr, in this instance, was enormous; a vast gulf between the man who saw clearly what was needed, and the obscurantist. So for me, it is a pity that Einstein’s idea doesn’t work. The reasonable thing just doesn’t work.
    • John Stewart Bell, quoted in Jeremy Bernstein, Quantum Profiles (1991), "John Stewart Bell: Quantum Engineer"
  • Bohr was inconsistent, unclear, willfully obscure and right. Einstein was consistent, clear, down-to-earth and wrong.
  • The EPR paper came out in 1935 and for at least two decades no one paid much attention to it. However, in 1964, the late John Bell published a paper that changed everything. He showed that Einstein’s idea that the results of quantum mechanics could be reproduced by a theory in which Einstein’s notions of realism were included could be tested in the laboratory. Having spent a good deal of time talking to Bell I can tell you that his heart was with Einstein. He often referred to Bohr as an “obscurantist.” But the experiments were carried out by Alain Aspect and others and showed that Einstein was wrong and Bohr was right. I cannot believe that anyone familiar with this would still agree with Einstein.
    • Jeremy Bernstein, "Einstein: An Exchange", The New York Review of Books (August 16, 2007)
  • His thought experiment with photon and film had not challenged Heisenberg's principle, but now Einstein did turn his attention there. He began looking for an experiment that would allow a more complete collection of data than the Heisenberg team thought possible. If he could find a technique that allowed the simultaneous discovery of position and momentum or time and energy, he would prove the quantum mechanics had indeed not yet brought us to the the secret of the Old One.
    This effort led the most famous set-pieces of the Einstein "debate" with Bohr over quantum mechanics. Einstein, Bohr, and Ehrenfest would meet in the hotel dining room for breakfast. Einstein would propose a thought experiment. Bohr would think about it. ...
    During the day's program at Solvay, Heisenberg and Pauli would analyze the experiment that Einstein had proposed. They would find some point where the uncertainty principle fought back, and over dinner, Bohr wold refute the experimental effort while Ehrenfest looked on.
  • The mid-twentieth century “Bohr-Einstein debate” about quantum theory is often misinterpreted as a personal clash between wizards. So counter-intuitive are quantum theory’s predictions that, under the leadership of one of its pioneers, Neils Bohr, a myth grew that there is no underlying reality that explains them. Particles get from A to B without passing through the intervening space, where they have insufficient energy to exist; they briefly “borrow” the energy, because we are “uncertain” about what their energy is. Information gets from A to B without anything passing in between – what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” And so on....So, while most accounts say that Bohr won the debate, my view is that Einstein, as usual, was seeking an explanation of reality, while his rivals were advocating nonsense. Everett’s interpretation doesn’t make Einstein a demigod. But it does make him right.
  • Einstein was not prepared to let us do what, to him, amounted to pulling the ground from under his feet. Later in life, also, when quantum theory had long since become an integral part of modern physics, Einstein was unable to change his attitude—at best, he was prepared to accept the existence of quantum theory as a temporary expedient. "God does not throw dice" was his unshakable principle, one that he would not allow anybody to challenge. To which Bohr could only counter with: "Nor is it our business to prescribe to God how He should run the world."
  • Their dispute went to the fundamental heart of the design of the cosmos. Was there an objective reality that existed whether or not we could ever observe it? Were there laws that restored strict causality to phenomena that seemed inherently random? Was everything in the universe predetermined?
  • Einstein's thinking is always on the ontological level traditional in physics; trying to describe the realities of Nature. Bohr's thinking is always on the epistemological level, describing not reality but only our information about reality.
    • E. T. Jaynes, "Probability in Quantum Theory", in Wojciech H. Zurek (ed.), Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information (1990)
  • The famous debate between Einstein and Bohr began at the Solvay Council in 1927. The debate was about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, but also addressed the fundamental question of what the purpose and aim of a physical theory should be. Their conflicting positions were based on two diametrically opposed philosophical approaches to the fundamental problems of physics. The many books popularising quantum mechanics quite rightly place the emphasis on the problem of interpretation: they discuss the opposing positions of Einstein’s “realism” and the “Copenhagen interpretation” of which Bohr is seen as the leading protagonist.
  • We, of course, were sure that on that particular debate Bohr was right and Einstein was wrong.
    • Rudolf Peierls, interview in The Ghost in the Atom: A Discussion of the Mysteries of Quantum Physics (1986) edited by P. C. W. Davies and Julian R. Brown
  • The refutation of Einstein’s criticism does not add any new element to the conception of complementarity, but it is of great importance in laying bare a very deep-lying opposition between Bohr’s general philosophical attitude and the still widespread habits of thought belonging to a glorious but irrevocably bygone age in the evolution of science.
    • Léon Rosenfeld, "Niels Bohr in the thirties. Consolidation and extension of the conception of complementarity". In S. Rozental (Ed.), Niels Bohr: His life and work as seen by his friends and colleagues (1967)
  • Albert Einstein, who was in many ways the father of quantum mechanics, had a notorious love-hate relation with the subject. His debates with Niels Bohr—Bohr completely accepting of quantum mechanics and Einstein deeply skeptical— are famous in the history of science. It was generally accepted by most physicists that Bohr won and Einstein lost. My own feeling, I think shared by a growing number of physicists, is that this attitude does not do justice to Einstein’s views.
    Both Bohr and Einstein were subtle men. Einstein tried very hard to show that quantum mechanics was inconsistent; Bohr, however, was always able to counter his arguments. But in his final attack Einstein pointed to something so deep, so counterintuitive, so troubling, and yet so exciting, that at the beginning of the twenty-first century it has returned to fascinate theoretical physicists. Bohr’s only answer to Einstein’s last great discovery—the discovery of entanglement—was to ignore it.
    • Leonard Susskind, in Leonard Susskind and Art Friedman, Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum (2014), Preface
  • To this day, many researchers agree with Bohr's pragmatic attitude. The history books say that Bohr has proved Einstein wrong. But others, including myself, suspect that, in the long run, the Einsteinian view might return: that there is something missing in the Copenhagen interpretation. Einstein's original objections could be overturned, but problems still arise if one tries to formulate the quantum mechanics of the entire universe (where measurements can never be repeated), and if one tries to reconcile the laws of quantum mechanics with those of gravitation. But I am running far ahead in my story (I will return to this point in chapter 28). For a correct description of atoms and molecules, quantum mechanics is a perfect theory.
    • Gerard 't Hooft, In search of the ultimate building blocks (1997), Ch. 3. The magical mystery of the quanta
  • The other mistake that is widely attributed to Einstein is that he was on the wrong side in his famous debate with Niels Bohr over quantum mechanics, starting at the Solvay Congress of 1927 and continuing into the 1930s. In brief, Bohr had presided over the formulation of a “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics, in which it is only possible to calculate the probabilities of the various possible outcomes of experiments. Einstein rejected the notion that the laws of physics could deal with probabilities, famously decreeing that God does not play dice with the cosmos. But history gave its verdict against Einstein—quantum mechanics went on from success to success, leaving Einstein on the sidelines.
    All this familiar story is true, but it leaves out an irony. Bohr’s version of quantum mechanics was deeply flawed, but not for the reason Einstein thought. The Copenhagen interpretation describes what happens when an observer makes a measurement, but the observer and the act of measurement are themselves treated classically. This is surely wrong: Physicists and their apparatus must be governed by the same quantum mechanical rules that govern everything else in the universe.
  • In the famous Einstein–Bohr debates, Bohr defended quantum mechanics against Einstein's yearning for a more classical theory; but some of us are coming to feel in defending his hard-won ground he compromised too much. Quantum mechanics should be pushed as hard as possible, to the point where it can describe within itself a recognizable caricature of the world as it is experienced, and thus begin to provide its own self-consisted interpretation — or else there should be some definite change in its equations. As yet this task has not been accomplished.

  • Einstein’s great friend and intellectual sparring partner Niels Bohr had a nuanced view of truth. Whereas according to Bohr, the opposite of a simple truth is a falsehood, the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth. In that spirit, let us introduce the concept of a deep falsehood, whose opposite is likewise a deep falsehood. It seems fitting to conclude this essay with an epigram that, paired with the one we started with, gives a nice example:

    “Naïveté is doing the same thing over and over, and always expecting the same result.”

See also

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