Spooky Physics

Einstein ultimately found the implications of quantum theory so unsettling that he made a number of terse remarks on it. In a letter to Max Born, dated September 1944, he wrote, “You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to find. Even the great initial success of the Quantum Theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice-game….”  In fact, Einstein spent a good sum of his life trying to come up with thought experiments which would demonstrate the incompleteness of quantum theory and show why it was at best an interregnum theory which would in time yield to a more reasonable and deterministic one. As he quipped to Born, “Although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility. No doubt the day will come when we will see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one.” This book is a brief introduction to the famous Einstein-Bohr debate over the implications of quantum theory with a special focus on the philosophical ramifications of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.