Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set

by Walter Isaacson

  One problem with Einstein’s willingness to sign on to various and sundry movements, appeals, and honorary chairmanships was that, as before, it opened him to charges that he was a dupe for those that were fronts for communists or other subversives. This purported sin was compounded, in the eyes of those who were suspicious about his loyalty, when he declined to sign on to some crusades that attacked Stalin or the Soviets.

  For example, when his friend Isaac Don Levine, whose anticommunist writings Einstein had previously endorsed, asked him to sign a petition in 1934 condemning Stalin’s murder of political prisoners, this time Einstein balked. “I, too, regret immensely that the Russian political leaders let themselves be carried away,” Einstein wrote. “In spite of this, I cannot associate myself with your action. It will have no impact in Russia. The Russians have proved that their only aim is really the improvement of the lot of the Russian people.”64

  It was a gauzy view of the Russians and of Stalin’s murderous regime, one that history would prove wrong. Einstein was so intent on fighting the Nazis, and so annoyed that Levine had shifted so radically from left to right, that he reacted strongly against those who would equate the Russian purges with the Nazi holocaust.

  An even larger set of trials in Moscow began in 1936, involving supporters of the exiled Leon Trotsky, and again Einstein rebuffed some of his former friends from the left who had now swung to become ardently anticommunist. The philosopher Sidney Hook, a recovering Marxist, wrote Einstein, asking him to speak out in favor of the creation of an international public commission to assure that Trotsky and his supporters would get a fair hearing rather than merely a show trial. “There is no doubt that every accused person should be given an opportunity to establish his innocence,” Einstein replied. “This certainly holds true for Trotsky.” But how should this be accomplished? Einstein suggested it would best be done privately, without a public commission.65

  In a very long letter, Hook tried to rebut each of Einstein’s concerns, but Einstein lost interest in arguing with Hook and did not respond. So Hook phoned him in Princeton. He reached Helen Dukas, and somehow was able to make it through her defensive shield to set up an appointment.

  Einstein received Hook cordially, brought him up to his study lair, smoked his pipe, and spoke in English. After listening to Hook again make his case, Einstein expressed sympathy but said he thought the whole enterprise was unlikely to succeed. “From my point of view,” he proclaimed, “both Stalin and Trotsky are political gangsters.” Hook later said that even though he disagreed with Einstein, “I could appreciate his reasons,” especially because Einstein emphasized that he was “aware of what communists were capable of doing.”

  Wearing an old sweatshirt and no socks, Einstein walked Hook back to the train station. Along the way, he explained his anger at the Germans. They had raided his house in Caputh searching for communist weapons, he said, and found only a bread knife to confiscate. One remark he made turned out to be very prescient. “If and when war comes,” he said, “Hitler will realize the harm he has done Germany by driving out the Jewish scientists.”66

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT

  1935

  “Spooky Action at a Distance”

  The thought experiments that Einstein had lobbed like grenades into the temple of quantum mechanics had done little damage to the edifice. In fact, they helped test it and permit a better understanding of its implications. But Einstein remained a resister, and he continued to conjure up new ways to show that the uncertainties inherent in the interpretations formulated by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and others meant that something was missing in their explanation of “reality.”

  Just before he left Europe in 1933, Einstein attended a lecture by Léon Rosenfeld, a Belgian physicist with a philosophical bent. When it was over, Einstein rose from the audience to ask a question. “Suppose two particles are set in motion towards each other with the same, very large, momentum, and they interact with each other for a very short time when they pass at known positions,” he posited. When the particles have bounced far apart, an observer measures the momentum of one of them. “Then, from the conditions of the experiment, he will obviously be able to deduce the momentum of the other particle,” Einstein said. “If, however, he chooses to measure the position of the first particle, he will be able to tell where the other particle is.”

  Because the two particles were far apart, Einstein was able to assert, or at least to assume, that “all physical interaction has ceased between them.” So his challenge to the Copenhagen interpreters of quantum mechanics, posed as a question to Rosenfeld, was simple: “How can the final state of the second particle be influenced by a measurement performed on the first?”1

  Over the years, Einstein had increasingly come to embrace the concept of realism, the belief that there is, as he put it, “a real factual situation” that exists “independent of our observations.”2 This belief was one aspect of his discomfort with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and other tenets of quantum mechanics that assert that observations determine realities. With his question to Rosenfeld, Einstein was deploying another concept: locality.* In other words, if two particles are spatially distant from each other, anything that happens to one is independent from what happens to the other, and no signal or force or influence can move between them faster than the speed of light.

  Observing or poking one particle, Einstein posited, could not instantaneously jostle or jangle another one far away. The only way an action on one system can affect a distant one is if some wave or signal or information traveled between them—a process that would have to obey the speed limit of light. That was even true of gravity. If the sun suddenly disappeared, it would not affect the earth’s orbit for about eight minutes, the amount of time it would take the change in the gravitational field to ripple to the earth at the speed of light.

  As Einstein said, “There is one supposition we should, in my opinion, absolutely hold fast: the real factual situation of the system S2 is independent of what is done with the system S1, which is spatially separated from the former.”3 It was so intuitive that it seemed obvious. But as Einstein noted, it was a “supposition.” It had never been proven.

  To Einstein, realism and localism were related underpinnings of physics. As he declared to his friend Max Born, coining a memorable phrase, “Physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.”4

  Once he had settled in Princeton, Einstein began to refine this thought experiment. His sidekick, Walther Mayer, less loyal to Einstein than Einstein was to him, had drifted away from the front lines of fighting quantum mechanics, so Einstein enlisted the help of Nathan Rosen, a 26-year-old new fellow at the Institute, and Boris Podolsky, a 49-year-old physicist Einstein had met at Caltech who had since moved to the Institute.

  The resulting four-page paper, published in May 1935 and known by the initials of its authors as the EPR paper, was the most important paper Einstein would write after moving to America. “Can the Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Regarded as Complete?” they asked in their title.

  Rosen did a lot of the math, and Podolsky wrote the published English version. Even though they had discussed the content at length, Einstein was displeased that Podolsky had buried the clear conceptual issue under a lot of mathematical formalism. “It did not come out as well as I had originally wanted,” Einstein complained to Schrödinger right after it was published. “Rather, the essential thing was, so to speak, smothered by the formalism.”5

  Einstein was also annoyed at Podolsky for leaking the contents to the New York Times before it was published. The headline read: “Einstein Attacks Quantum Theory / Scientist and Two Colleagues Find It Not ‘Complete’ Even though ‘Correct.’ ” Einstein, of course, had occasionally succumbed to giving interviews about upcoming articles, but this time he declared himself dismayed by the practice. “It is my invariable practice to discuss scientifi
c matters only in the appropriate forum,” he wrote in a statement to the Times, “and I deprecate advance publication of any announcement in regard to such matters in the secular press.”6

  Einstein and his two coauthors began by defining their realist premise: “If without in any way disturbing a system we can predict with certainty the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of physical reality corresponding to this physical quantity.”7 In other words, if by some process we could learn with absolute certainty the position of a particle, and we have not disturbed the particle by observing it, then we can say the particle’s position is real, that it exists in reality totally independent of our observations.

  The paper went on to expand Einstein’s thought experiment about two particles that have collided (or have flown off in opposite directions from the disintegration of an atom) and therefore have properties that are correlated. We can take measurements of the first particle, the authors asserted, and from that gain knowledge about the second particle “without in any way disturbing the second particle.” By measuring the position of the first particle, we can determine precisely the position of the second particle. And we can do the same for the momentum. “In accordance with our criterion for reality, in the first case we must consider the quantity P as being an element of reality, in the second case the quantity Q is an element of reality.”

  In simpler words: at any moment the second particle, which we have not observed, has a position that is real and a momentum that is real. These two properties are features of reality that quantum mechanics does not account for; thus the answer to the title’s question should be no, quantum mechanics’ description of reality is not complete.8

  The only alternative, the authors argued, would be to claim that the process of measuring the first particle affects the reality of the position and momentum of the second particle. “No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this,” they concluded.

  Wolfgang Pauli wrote Heisenberg a long and angry letter.“Einstein has once again expressed himself publicly on quantum mechanics (together with Podolsky and Rosen—no good company, by the way),” he fumed. “As is well known, every time that happens it is a catastrophe.”9

  When the EPR paper reached Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, he realized that he had once again been cast in the role, which he played so well at the Solvay Conferences, of defending quantum mechanics from yet another Einstein assault. “This onslaught came down on us as a bolt from the blue,” a colleague of Bohr’s reported. “Its effect on Bohr was remarkable.” He had often reacted to such situations by wandering around and muttering, “Einstein . . . Einstein . . . Einstein!” This time he added some collaborative doggerel as well: “Podolsky, Opodolsky, Iopodolsky, Siopodolsky . . .”10

  “Everything else was abandoned,” Bohr’s colleague recalled. “We had to clear up such a misunderstanding at once.”Even with such intensity, it took Bohr more than six weeks of fretting, writing, revising, dictating, and talking aloud before he finally sent off his response to EPR.

  It was longer than the original paper. In it Bohr backed away somewhat from what had been an aspect of the uncertainty principle: that the mechanical disturbance caused by the act of observation was a cause of the uncertainty. He admitted that in Einstein’s thought experiment, “there is no question of a mechanical disturbance of the system under investigation.”11

  This was an important admission. Until then, the disturbance caused by a measurement had been part of Bohr’s physical explanation of quantum uncertainty. At the Solvay Conferences, he had rebutted Einstein’s ingenious thought experiments by showing that the simultaneous knowledge of, say, position and momentum was impossible at least in part because determining one attribute caused a disturbance that made it impossible to then measure the other attribute precisely.

  However, using his concept of complementarity, Bohr added a significant caveat. He pointed out that the two particles were part of one whole phenomenon. Because they have interacted, the two particles are therefore “entangled.” They are part of one whole phenomenon or one whole system that has one quantum function.

  In addition, the EPR paper did not, as Bohr noted, truly dispel the uncertainty principle, which says that it is not possible to know both the precise position and momentum of a particle at the same moment. Einstein is correct, that if we measure the position of particle A, we can indeed know the position of its distant twin B. Likewise, if we measure the momentum of A, we can know the momentum of B. However, even if we can imagine measuring the position and then the momentum of particle A, and thus ascribe a “reality” to those attributes in particle B, we cannot in fact measure both these attributes precisely at any one time for particle A, and thus we cannot know them both precisely for particle B. Brian Greene, discussing Bohr’s response, has put it simply: “If you don’t have both of these attributes of the right-moving particle in hand, you don’t have them for the left-moving particle either. Thus there is no conflict with the uncertainty principle.”12

  Einstein continued to insist, however, that he had pinpointed an important example of the incompleteness of quantum mechanics by showing how it violated the principle of separability, which holds that two systems that are spatially separated have an independent existence. It likewise violated the related principle of locality, which says that an action on one of these systems cannot immediately affect the other. As an adherent of field theory, which defines reality using a spacetime continuum, Einstein believed that separability was a fundamental feature of nature. And as a defender of his own theory of relativity, which rid Newton’s cosmos of spooky action at a distance and decreed instead that such actions obey the speed limit of light, he believed in locality as well.13

  Schrödinger’s Cat

  Despite his success as a quantum pioneer, Erwin Schrödinger was among those rooting for Einstein to succeed in deflating the Copenhagen consensus. Their alliance had been forged at the Solvay Conferences, where Einstein played God’s advocate and Schrödinger looked on with a mix of curiosity and sympathy. It was a lonely struggle, Einstein lamented in a letter to Schrödinger in 1928: “The Heisenberg-Bohr tranquilizing philosophy—or religion?—is so delicately contrived that, for the time being, it provides a gentle pillow for the true believer from which he cannot very easily be aroused.”14

  So it was not surprising that Schrödinger sent Einstein a congratulatory note as soon as he read the EPR paper. “You have publicly caught dogmatic quantum mechanics by its throat,” he wrote. A few weeks later, he added happily, “Like a pike in a goldfish pond it has stirred everyone up.”15

  Schrödinger had just visited Princeton, and Einstein was still hoping, in vain, that Flexner might be convinced to hire him for the Institute. In his subsequent flurry of exchanges with Schrödinger, Einstein began conspiring with him on ways to poke holes in quantum mechanics.

  “I do not believe in it,” Einstein declared flatly. He ridiculed as “spiritualistic” the notion that there could be “spooky action at a distance,” and he attacked the idea that there was no reality beyond our ability to observe things. “This epistemology-soaked orgy ought to burn itself out,” he said. “No doubt, however, you smile at me and think that, after all, many a young whore turns into an old praying sister, and many a young revolutionary becomes an old reactionary.”16 Schrödinger did smile, he told Einstein in his reply, because he had likewise edged from revolutionary to old reactionary.

  On one issue Einstein and Schrödinger diverged. Schrödinger did not feel that the concept of locality was sacred. He even coined the term that we now use, entanglement, to describe the correlations that exist between two particles that have interacted but are now distant from each other. The quantum states of two particles that have interacted must subsequently be described together, with any changes to one particle instantly being reflected in the other, no matter how far apart they now are. “Entanglement of predictions arises from the fact that the two bodies at some earlier tim
e formed in a true sense one system, that is were interacting, and have left behind traces on each other,” Schrödinger wrote. “If two separated bodies enter a situation in which they influence each other, and separate again, then there occurs what I have just called entanglement of our knowledge of the two bodies.”17

  Einstein and Schrödinger together began exploring another way—one that did not hinge on issues of locality or separation—to raise questions about quantum mechanics. Their new approach was to look at what would occur when an event in the quantum realm, which includes subatomic particles, interacted with objects in the macro world, which includes those things we normally see in our daily lives.

  In the quantum realm, there is no definite location of a particle, such as an electron, at any given moment. Instead, a mathematical function, known as a wave function, describes the probability of finding the particle in some particular place. These wave functions also describe quantum states, such as the probability that an atom will, when observed, be decayed or not. In 1925, Schrödinger had come up with his famous equation that described these waves, which spread and smear throughout space. His equation defined the probability that a particle, when observed, will be found in a particular place or state.18

  According to the Copenhagen interpretation developed by Niels Bohr and his fellow pioneers of quantum mechanics, until such an observation is made, the reality of the particle’s position or state consists only of these probabilities. By measuring or observing the system, the observer causes the wave function to collapse and one distinct position or state to snap into place.

  In a letter to Schrödinger, Einstein gave a vivid thought experiment showing why all this discussion of wave functions and probabilities, and of particles that have no definite positions until observed, failed his test of completeness. He imagined two boxes, one of which we know contains a ball. As we prepare to look in one of the boxes, there is a 50 percent chance of the ball being there. After we look, there is either a 100 percent or a 0 percent chance it is in there. But all along, in reality, the ball was in one of the boxes. Einstein wrote: