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Paul Dirac and the Einstein-Bohr Debate Paul Dirac and the Einstein-Bohr Debate Alisa Bokulich Boston University Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/16/1/103/1789489/posc.2008.16.1.103.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Although Dirac rarely participated in the interpretational debates over quantum theory, it is traditionally assumed that his views were aligned with Heisenberg and Bohr in the so-called Copenhagen-Göttingen camp. However, an unpublished—and apparently unknown—lecture of Dirac’s re- veals that this view is mistaken; in the famous debate between Einstein and Bohr, Dirac sided with Einstein. Surprisingly, Dirac believed that quantum mechanics was not complete, that the uncertainty principle would not survive in the future physics, and that a deterministic description of the microworld would be recovered. In this paper I show how we can make sense of this un- published lecture in the context of Dirac’s broader philosophy of quantum me- chanics, and how our present understanding of Dirac’s philosophical views must be revised. 1. Introduction Although Paul Dirac carried out most of his research in England, it is of- ten assumed that his philosophical views on quantum mechanics were squarely within the so-called Copenhagen-Göttingen camp, whose mem- bers included Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. It is also typically as- sumed that Dirac was uninterested in the “Einstein-Bohr Debate,” which was a long-standing philosophical debate over various aspects of quantum theory, consisting primarily of a series of challenges posed by Einstein, and Bohr’s responses to these challenges. One ªnds this characterization of Dirac’s views, for example, in Helge Kragh’s excellent biography of Dirac, in which he writes, “By and large, Dirac shared the positivist and instru- mentalist attitude of the Copenhagen-Göttingen camp...Dirac never showed any interest in the opposition waged against Bohr’s views by Ein- stein, Schrödinger, or deBroglie....Basically he was not very interested Perspectives on Science 2008, vol. 16, no. 1 ©2008 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology 103 104 Paul Dirac and the Einstein-Bohr Debate in the interpretational debate” (Kragh 80–81). In this paper, however, I shall argue that both of these assumptions about Dirac are mistaken. Not only was Dirac interested in the Einstein-Bohr Debate, but contrary to popular opinion, he sided with Einstein, against the Copenhagen- Göttingen camp. At the center of my argument is an unpublished lecture of Dirac’s enti- tled “Einstein and Bohr: The Great Controversy,” in which Dirac makes Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/16/1/103/1789489/posc.2008.16.1.103.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 explicit his allegiance to Einstein in this debate. After discussing this lec- ture in some depth, I shall show that this was not just a temporary lapse in Dirac’s better judgment, but rather is a coherent part of his broader philo- sophical views concerning quantum theory, as they developed over his ca- reer. 2. The Einstein-Bohr Debate Before turning to Dirac’s views on the Einstein-Bohr debate it is helpful to brieºy review the central issues at stake in this debate. The debate be- tween Einstein and Bohr began as a series of informal discussions in 1927 at the Fifth Solvay Congress. Our sources for this stage of the debate are the discussion in the proceedings of the Solvay meeting, Bohr’s later recol- lections of this encounter in 1949, and a contemporaneous letter from Paul Ehrenfest who was present at the debates. In the discussions at the congress, Einstein proposes a simple experiment involving a screen with a small aperture through which electrons pass, and some photographic ªlm in the shape of semicircle on the other side. He notes that regarding quan- tum mechanics, there are two different possible interpretations one can take regarding the domain of validity of this theory. According to Inter- pretation I, “the theory does not give any information about the individ- ual processes, but only about an ensemble of an inªnity of elementary pro- cesses” (Einstein 1927, 254; translated and reprinted in BCW 6, 101).1 This is contrasted with Interpretation II, according to which “the theory claims to be a complete theory of the individual processes.” Einstein continues, I have objections to make against interpretation II....Theinter- pretation according to which |␺|2 expresses the probability that this particle is situated at a certain place presupposes a very particular mechanism of action at a distance which would prevent the wave continuously distributed in space from acting at two places of the screen....Interpretation II of |␺|2 in my opinion implies a contra- 1. ‘BCW’ stands for Niels Bohr Collected Works. Perspectives on Science 105 diction with the relativity postulate. (Einstein 1927, 255–256; translated and reprinted in BCW 6, 102.) In these quotations we see that there are a cluster of concerns that Einstein is raising about the new quantum theory: ªrst, whether quantum mechan- ics should be understood as a statistical theory about ensembles, or a the- ory of individual systems. Second, whether quantum mechanics is a com- plete theory; and third, whether quantum mechanics possesses an action at Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/16/1/103/1789489/posc.2008.16.1.103.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 a distance that would conºict with relativity.2 In Bohr’s account of this discussion he also recalls Einstein “mockingly [asking] us whether we could really believe that the providential authorities took recourse to dice- playing” (Bohr 1949, p. 218)—a comment quite similar to the one that Einstein had made to Max Born a year earlier (Einstein 1926). This sug- gests a fourth concern of Einstein’s, namely that he objected to the funda- mental indeterminism of the theory. Finally there is a letter from Paul Ehrenfest, just two months after the congress, which gives further insight into the informal discussions that took place between Einstein and Bohr. Ehrenfest writes, It was delightful for me to be present during the conversations be- tween Bohr and Einstein. Like a game of chess. Einstein all the time with new examples. In a certain sense a sort of Perpetuum Mobile of the second kind to break the uncertainty relation. Bohr from out of the philosophical smoke clouds constantly search- ing for the tools to crush one example after the other. Einstein like a jack-in-the-box: jumping out fresh every morning. (Letter from Ehrenfest to Goudsmit, Uhlenbeck and Dieke, November 3rd 1927; trans. and reprinted in BCW 6, p. 38.) This letter reveals that, in the informal discussions, Einstein was also cen- trally concerned with challenging the fundamental status of the uncer- tainty relations. The next episode of the Einstein-Bohr debate took place three years later at the Sixth Solvay Congress. Regrettably this stage of the debate did not make it into the published proceedings of the congress, and we must once again rely on Bohr’s recollection of the discussions and the correspon- dence of the participants after the congress. At this meeting Einstein in- troduced another thought experiment, which has come to be known as the “photon box” thought experiment, involving a box with a shutter con- trolled by a clock that would emit a single photon at a precisely determi- 2. Arthur Fine, in his book The Shaky Game, uses Einstein’s unpublished 1927 critique of wave mechanics to identify an even broader list of concerns that Einstein had regarding quantum theory in this year. 106 Paul Dirac and the Einstein-Bohr Debate nable time. According to Bohr’s recollections, Einstein introduced this de- vice as a way to beat the uncertainty principle. Using the relation E ϭ mc2, one can, after registering the time of the photon’s emission, also pre- cisely determine the energy of the photon by weighing the box before and after the emission. Such a simultaneously precise determination of the en- ergy and time of the photon, would amount to a violation of the energy- time uncertainty principle. Bohr’s response to this thought experiment in- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/16/1/103/1789489/posc.2008.16.1.103.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 volved showing that a consideration of the effect of the change in the grav- itational ªeld on the rate of the clock, reveals that such a method cannot in fact be used to beat the uncertainty principle. There is, however, considerable controversy concerning whether Bohr correctly understood the aim of Einstein’s photon-box thought experi- ment, and hence whether his account of this stage of the debate is accu- rate. Don Howard (1990) has cogently argued that the photon box thought experiment that Einstein introduces at the Sixth Solvay Congress was intended as a proto-EPR argument. The central piece of supporting evidence for this interpretation comes from a letter that Ehrenfest wrote to Bohr in 1931: He [Einstein] said to me that, for a very long time already, he abso- lutely no longer doubted the uncertainty relations, and that he thus, e.g., had by no means invented the ‘weighable light-ºash box’ (let us call it L-F-box) ‘contra uncertainty relation,’ but for a totally different purpose. (Ehrenfest 1931 in Howard 1990, 98; emphasis Ehrenfest’s.) Bohr also alludes to this letter in his 1949 recollections, and suggests that Einstein had initially intended the photon box as a challenge to the uncer- tainty relations, but then showed that it could also be used to draw out an- other challenge to quantum theory. It is worth
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