How Einstein Lost the Battle To Explain Quantum Reality

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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