Does EPR represent Einstein's views very well?

[box]

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy seems to say it dosn't. I took this quote from there website

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-epr/

"Whatever their precursors, the ideas that found their way into EPR were worked out in a series of meetings with Einstein and
his two assistants, Podolsky and Rosen. The actual text, however, was written by Podolsky and, apparently, Einstein did not
see the final draft (certainly he did not inspect it) before Podolsky submitted the paper to Physical Review in March of 1935,
where it was accepted for publication without changes. Right after it was published Einstein complained that his central
concerns were obscured by the overly technical nature of Podolsky's development of the argument.


For reasons of language this [paper] was written by Podolsky after several discussions. Still, it did not come out as well as
I had originally wanted; rather, the essential thing was, so to speak, smothered by the formalism [Gelehrsamkeit].
(Letter from Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, June 19, 1935. In Fine 1996, p. 35.)"

Here is an essay by Einstein that probably describes his views better

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/einstein.htm

 

[my_wan]

Einstein very motivation in designing the EPR thought experiment was to show that Quantum Mechanics couldn't possibly be right or complete in its conception at the time. Low and behold it was eventually tested directly in the Aspect experiment.

 

[box]

Einstein very motivation in designing the EPR thought experiment was to show that Quantum Mechanics couldn't possibly be right or complete in its conception at the time. Low and behold it was eventually tested directly in the Aspect experiment.

I don't think so

 

[Tez]

By far the best reference I know addressing this question is:

Don Howard, "Einstein on locality and separability", Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, vol 16, page 171 (1985). This paper is really great - for instance, he analyses Einstein's concerns with non-separability pre the Schroedinger equation! (he realized that Bose-Einstein statistics were going to
conflict with classical notions of seperaility). And there's much more...

Arthur Fine also talks about this in "The Shaky Game" IIRC.

 

[caribou]

I read that the actual idea that is the basis of EPR is believed to have come from Podolsky.

 

[ttn]

I read that the actual idea that is the basis of EPR is believed to have come from Podolsky.

Actually, the idea that is the basis of EPR was all Einstein's. He'd been making the same point since at least the 1927 Solvay Conference. Podolsky's rather unfortunate role was as the author of the EPR paper -- unfortunate because (at least according to Einstein) Podolsky botched the job somewhat and didn't get the real essence of Einstein's ideas/worries across clearly in the paper. The references mentioned earlier (Don Howard and Arthur Fine) discuss this in some detail. Another good reference (available online) is
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0404016

 

[caribou]

What I read is that while Einstein had proposed many ideal experiments before focused on finding inconsistencies, it was the new ideal experiment of the EPR paper focused on completeness which is believed to be probably due to Podolsky. I mention this to be a bit clearer about precisely what I read. It was in The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics by Roland Omnes that I read this.

It might be fair enough that Podolsky wrote up the paper the way he wanted if the actual idea the EPR paper itself was about was his.

 

[Tez]

Another good reference (available online) is
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0404016

That is a very nice paper, I highly recommed it.