miosim said:
Please provide quotes from Einstein's writings to support this.
OK. In this post my comments will be in blue, quotes from Einstein and other authors in normal black text. Here are some quotes from a letter Einstein wrote to Schrödinger immediately after the EPR paper, saying that he thought the paper did not do such a good job explaining his point, and trying to clarify his own meaning with use of a helpful analogy. This is from pp. 167-168 of
The Age of Entanglement by Louisa Gilder:[/color]
Einstein had not yet received Schrödinger's letter, when, on June 17, he wrote to him of Bohr's point of view: "I consider the renunciation of a spatio-temporal setting for real events to be idealistic, even spiritualistic. This epistemology-soaked orgy ought to burn itself out." He was not sure where Schrödinger stood in all of this: "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."
The next day, Schrödinger's letter arrived, and Einstein thanked him for it, explaining that he had not written the paper himself and apologizing that it "did not come out as well as I had originally wanted; rather the essential thing was, so to speak, smothered by the formalism." For example, he explained, "I don't give a
sausage" whether or not incompatible observables--Bohr's favorite subject--are involved.
It all came down to the relationship of Schrödinger's equation to reality. What is the connection between the mathematical description of events, and the events themselves? In what way does the Schrödinger wavefunction, ψ, reflect the actual state that a particle found itself in? Reality, or the particle's real situation, is represented in these discussions by the word
state or the phrase
state of affairs. The wavefunction, ψ, must represent this real state of affairs somehow. But it was hard to even articulate what was meant by such a connection to reality, or even what was meant by
reality or
state.
In his letter to Schrödinger, Einstein characteristically cut through this briar patch of linguistics with a parable. He wanted to illuminate the main point that had been obscured in the EPR paper. "In front of me stand two boxes, with lids that can be opened, and into which I can look when they are open. This looking is called 'making an observation.' In addition there is a ball, which can be found in one or the other of the two boxes where an observation is made. Now I describe a state of affairs as follows:
The probability is one-half that the ball is in the first box." (This is all the Schrödinger equation will tell you.) "Is this a complete description?" asks Einstein, and then gives two different answers.
"NO: A complete description is: the ball
is (or is not) in the first box...
"YES: Before I open the box the ball is not in
one of the two boxes. Being in a definite box only comes about when I lift the covers...
"Naturally, the second 'spiritualist' or
Schrödingerian interpretation is absurd," Einstein continued tactfully, "and the man on the street would only take the first,
Bornian, interpretation seriously." Born might not have recognized his interpretation, which Einstein seemed to be using in this description only as far as he wanted to, but presumably Bohr would have recognized himself, even without being named: "But the Talmudic philosopher whistles at 'Reality' as at a bugaboo of naïveté, and declares that the two conceptions differ only in their mode of expression...
"One cannot get at the Talmudist if one does not make use of a supplementary principle: the
separation principle," Einstein explains. "The contents of the second box are independent of what happens to the first. If one holds fast to the separation principle, only the Born description is possible, but not it is incomplete."
So I think it's fairly clear that Einstein is saying that if you have a scenario like this:
--Experimenters are performing a certain type of measurement on two objects (boxes or particles) and we find that they are guaranteed to get perfectly correlated results with probability 1 (like the guarantee that if one experimenter opens his box and gets the result "saw a ball", that must mean that when the other experimenter opened her box she got the result "didn't see a ball)
Then if we believe in the "separation principle" saying that any properties of one object immediately before measurement are independent of what happens to the other object, we must conclude that before measurement both objects had properties which predetermined the results they'd give, with the predetermined results being perfectly correlated (in terms of boxes, this just means that before either was opened there was already a definite truth that one had a ball inside and the other didn't, and the property of having a ball inside predetermines the measurement result "saw a ball" while the property of not having a ball inside predetermines the measurement result "didn't see a ball"). So the separation principle and the perfectly correlated results together imply there are local properties associated with each object before measurement, properties that predetermine their responses to being measured. And if the wavefunction does not specify these properties, then either the wavefunction is giving an incomplete description of the full physical state of each object, or the separation principle is false. But it's clear from the above that Einstein was on the side of the separation principle being true and the completeness of the wavefunction being false, he calls it "absurd" to advocate an interpretation where there is no definite truth about what's in each box until they're opened, and mocks this interpretation as being the argument of a "Talmudic philosopher".
Arthur Fine also talks about this letter in his book
The Shaky Game: Einstein Realism and the Quantum Theory, and after describing Einstein's two-box scenario, goes on to say on pp. 36-37:[/color]
Einstein continues in this letter to give a technical reformulation of the EPR argument. It is a little confusing because it introduces a further refinement of the idea of completeness (this time in terms of state functions correlated to real states of affairs). But I think there is enough material contained, as it were, in Einstein's boxes to give at least one formulation of some of the essentials of EPR that were obscured by Podolsky's exposition.
Consider the system of two particles correlated via the conservation law for total linear momentum. Separation is the claim that whether a physical property holds for one of the particles does not depend on measurements (or other interactions) made on the other particle when the pair is widely separated in space. Completeness is the claim that if a certain physical property in fact holds for one particle at a given time, then the state function for the combined system at that time should yield probability one for finding that the property does hold (i.e., the subsystem consisting of the particle should have a state function which is an eigenstate for the property in question).
One can now copy Einstein's box argument as follows. Suppose the two particles (A and B) are far apart and I measure, say, particle A for linear momentum (in a certain direction). Using the conservation law I can infer the linear momentum of particle B from the result of this measurement on A. Thus after the A measurement, the B particle has a certain linear momentum. By separation, this real property of B must have held already at the time when I began my measurement on A (or just before, in the case of instantaneous measurement). For otherwise I would have created the momentum at B by measuring A, in violation of separation. But at the initial moment of the A measurement, the state of the composite system does not yield probability one for finding
any momentum value for B, for that state is a nontrivial superposition of products of "momentum eigenstates" for the A and B subsystems. Hence the description provided by the state function given by quantum theory is incomplete. Here, as in the illustration, the argument establishes the incompatibility of separation and completeness.
It is this incompatibility that I take to be the central conclusion, which got obscured in EPR. Many years later, in Schilpp (1949, p. 682) Einstein put it succinctly in these words:
the paradox forces us to relinquish one of the following two assertions:
(1) the description by means of the ψ-function is complete
(2) the real states of spatially separated objects are independent of each other.
It is important to notice that the conclusion Einstein draws from EPR is not a categorical claim for the incompleteness of quantum theory. It is rather that the theory poses a dilemma between completeness and separation; both cannot be true. It is also important to notice that the argument I have drawn from Einstein's illustration does not depend in any way on simultaneous measurements or even attributions of position and momentum. The argument depends on the satisfaction of a single conservation law and the inferences drawn from that concerning the measurement of a single variable. This feature of the situation, I believe, is completely buried in the original paper and, because of that, Einstein's ideas concerning completeness and separation have become needlessly entangled with discussions of the uncertainty formulas and hidden variables. In his letter to Schrödinger of June 19, 1935, Einstein says that if the argument he gives applies to pairs of incompatible observables "ist mir
wurst," which I would translate loosely as "I couldn't care less." The argument nowhere depends on that, nor do the basic ideas.
Although Fine says that the basic argument was just to show the incompatibility of completeness and separation, as I noted above Einstein clearly favored keeping separation and throwing out the idea that the wavefunction provides a complete description (i.e. there must be other properties not specified by the wavefunction)...on p. 38 Fine also writes:[/color]
Einstein wanted to use the dilemma posed by EPR to show that if we maintain the ideas of action-by-contact embodied in the separation principle, then we must view quantum theory as providing no more than a statistical account of the realm of objects whose properties outstrip the descriptive apparatus of the theory. As we have seen, he felt that the concepts needed to describe these properties adequately would be other than the dynamical concepts of classical physics. Thus, although Einstein took the incompleteness to be a sign that something better was required, he never showed any interest in the hidden variables program for filling out the theory from within.
I think the point being made here is that although he thought that the wavefunction description was incomplete so some form of extra variables (whether "hidden" or potentially measurable by some technique not dreamed of by quantum physicists) would be needed in a more complete description, probably he didn't think this was likely to just involve assigning values to the conventional quantum variables like position and momentum in cases where the wavefunction doesn't specify their values, he was hoping the variables would be of some new type.
In terms of the box analogy, one might imagine that instead of one box containing a ball before being opened, they both contain computers connected to holographic projectors, and the computers can sense when the lid is being opened and depending on their programming they will either respond by projecting an image of a ball, or projecting the image of an empty box. In this case the local variables associated with each box would not consist of "ball" or "no ball", but rather would be a detailed specification of the programming of each computer. But it would still be true based on the separation principle and the perfect correlation between results that if one was programmed to project a ball when the box was opened, that must mean the other was programmed to project an empty box, so the local variables (the program of each computer) would still predetermine the fact that one would give the measurement result "saw a ball" and the other would give the result "didn't see a ball".
Note that this sort of thing is quite possible in my assumptions 1) and 2) (which as I said I think are just a restatement of Bell's assumptions), since 1) says nothing specific about what the "local facts" actually are. In the example of measuring the momentum of two entangled particles, all that's necessary for a perfect correlation is that whatever the local facts are that cause a measurement of one particle to reveal a momentum p, the local facts associated with the other particle must also such that if a momentum measurement is made on it, it will yield result -p.
The idea that Einstein didn't want the "extra" (possibly hidden) variables to just be specification of the values of unmeasured quantum-mechanical properties is also suggested by this quote from p. 57, which is discussing Einstein's idea that the wavefunction just stands for a
statistical ensemble of possible complete descriptions of the state:[/color]
This suggestion, that his remarks about ensembles constitute a kind of hidden variables theory, was actually put to Einstein in a letter from Aron Kupperman (November 10, 1954). In his reply Einstein does not deny the connection but rather downplays its significance by writing as follows, "I think it is not possible to get rid of the statistical character of the present quantum theory by merely adding something to the latter, without changing the fundamental concepts about the whole structure" (letter of November 14, 1954; from the English draft).
And on p. 58 Fine quotes Einstein's "Autobiographical Notes":[/color]
It is my opinion that the contemporary quantum theory by means of certain definitely laid down basic concepts, which on the whole have been taken over from classical mechanics, constitutes an optimal formulation of the connections. I believe, however, that this theory offers no useful point of departure for future developments. (Schilpp 1949, p. 87)
Finally on pp. 60-61 Fine describes what he understands as Einstein's idea of locality:[/color]
Einstein's several reworking of the EPR situation certainly involve a locality principle. It is this:
Einstein-locality. The real, physical state of one system is not immediately influenced by the kinds of measurements directly made on the second system, which is sufficiently spatially separated from the first.
I think my citations in the paper establish that this formulation is Einstein's. It differs from Bell's just over what it is that is not supposed to be influenced at a distance. For Bell it is the outcomes of the measurements of certain quantum observables (like spin). For Einstein it is the "real, physical states." In his various writings Einstein says even less about the nature of these postulated real states than the says about his ensemble interpretation, and for good reason. He was urging others, and struggling himself, to build a new theory that would "discover these states, i.e. invent them. Whatever these states are, they would indeed (in Einstein's conception, at least) determine the real physical variables and, most likely, the outcomes of measurement of
these. But Einstein is very clear that, in his opinion, the quantum mechanical variables (the "observables") are the wrong ones. They are not the real physical variables, and that is why it is hopeless to try to complete quantum theory from within.
I agree with Fine about the idea that the real physical states need not involve conventional QM observables like momentum (again think of my analogy in which the real state is the programming of a computer which can either project an image of a ball or an empty box when the box is opened), but I disagree that Bell's formulation was any different, see my comments in the second-to-last paragraph of [post=3264303]post #142[/post] explaining why I think that my notion of a theory involving an unspecified collection of "local facts" is equivalent to Bell's talk of "local beables".
I should also note that Fine thinks there is some possibility of getting around Bell's theorem by use of a "prism model" in which some particles are intrinsically "defective" for certain types of measurements, so if we try to measure a given property (like spin in a particular direction) some fraction of the particles just won't show up in our measurements and thus won't be included in our dataset, which means the choice of what to measure can no longer be considered independent of the properties that the particle had immediately before measurement in our dataset (if this is unclear, billschnieder explained this type of model in terms of my own lotto card analogy in posts [post=2767632]113[/post] and [post=2767828]115[/post] on an older thread). Bell does assume in most of his proofs that there is no correlation between particle properties before measurement and the choice of detector setting, but it seems to me that these prism models would be themselves contradict the predictions of QM, so they aren't really relevant to a theoretical proof showing that local realism is incompatible with QM. But in terms of the possibility that something like this could be true experimentally, I think this loophole is just one version of what's called the"detection efficency loophole", and there are modified versions of Bell inequalities which take into account that not all particle pairs are successfully measured, see
here. There have been Bell tests with ions that managed to close the detector efficiency loophole, see [post=2851208]this post[/post], although they didn't simultaneously close the
locality loophole (though experiments with photons have closed that one, none have yet closed both simultaneously. It seems pretty unlikely that we could have a non-contrived-looking local realist theory where both types of loopholes were being exploited at once, though.)[/color]