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Behold Ye! Einstein Declared the Winner of the Quantum Feud After 80 Years

Scientific history is a gem mine when it comes to feuds of the great minds: "Tesla and Edison":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents, "Oppenheimer and Teller":http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/3/7/motherboard-tv-doctor-teller-s-strange-loves-from...

Scientific history is a gem mine when it comes to feuds of the great minds: Tesla and Edison, Oppenheimer and Teller, Freud and Jung. But it’s rare that we ever get a chance to revisit them, or rather posthumously pick a new winner, something physicist Hrvoje Nikoli at the Rudjer Boskovic Institute in Croatia has recently sought to do in regards to Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr’s dispute dating back to the 1930’s on the consistency of quantum mechanics.

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The original core of the debate between these two physicists came at the Sixth Solvay conference in 1930, when Einstein challenged the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, stating that if a lid were opened on a box of photons, letting one escape, it could be measured in time based on how long the box was opened, and in energy based on the energy change inside the box, thereby challenging the time-energy
uncertainty relation.

in other words, he challenged this little ditty:

∆E ∆t >∼ h.

with this one:

∆E >∼h/∆t

For those not into quantum mechanics, this probably means close to nothing, but for people in the field it was a pretty bold statement.

In what was deemed the grand slam of physics rebuttals, Bohr stated that any quantum uncertainty could be explained if Einstein’s own Theory of Relativity were entered into the equation where gravity is a force that is accounted for, thereby winning the scientific face-off (or so many thought).

The debate somehow continued five years later in 1935 in a massive whirl of physics terminology game changers and mathematical semantics, where Einstein argued that quantum mechanics could not explain both quantum entanglement and the fact that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light, landing a major wrench in the field of quantum thinking. Bohr was unable to come up with a response, and then John Bell swooped in in 1964 and wrapped up the whole debacle by neatly coining the term “nonlocal.”

But this is where Nikoli’s findings come in, not only revisiting the 1930 debate on the time-energy uncertainty relation, but retroactively piecing together a new winner: Einstein, using Einstein’s explanation from 1935. Following?

Nikoli’s recently published paper, “EPR before EPR: a 1930 Einstein-Bohr thought experiment revisited” argues that had Einstein used his argument on entanglement in 1930, he could have disproven the correctness of Bohr’s argument, thereby winning the dispute. Alas, hindsight is 20/20 as they say especially when it involves eighty plus years of retroactive reasoning, and Einstein died, having lost to Bohr in one of the biggest scientific disagreements of the 20th century, and one of Bohr’s greatest victories.

At this point in time so much research has been done on quantum mechanics and now quantum computing that all this seems like maybe it was better left in the 1930’s, but it’s still nice to know that we all may die someday, but scientific legacies never do.