My God, He Plays Dice! How Albert Einstein Invented Most of Quantum Mechanics
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My God, He Plays Dice! How Albert Einstein Invented Most Of Quantum Mechanics Bob Doyle The Information Philosopher “beyond logic and language” Is it possible that the most famous critic of quantum mechanics actually invented most of its fundamentally important concepts? In his 1905 Brownian motion paper, Einstein quantized matter, proving the existence of atoms. His light quantum hypothesis showed that energy itself comes in particles (photons). He showed energy and matter are interchangeable, E = mc2. In 1905 Einstein was first to see nonlocality and instantaneous action-at-a-distance. In 1907 he saw quantum “jumps” between energy levels in matter, six years before Bohr postulated them in his atomic model. Einstein saw wave-particle duality and the “collapse” of the wave in 1909. And in 1916 his transition probabilities for emission and absorption processes introduced onto- logical chance when matter and radiation interact, making quantum mechanics statistical. He discovered the indistinguishability and odd quantum statistics of elementary particles in 1925 and in 1935 speculated about the nonseparability of interacting identical particles. It took physicists over twenty years to accept Einstein’s light-quantum. He explained the relation of particles to waves fifteen years before Heisenberg matrices and Schrödinger wave functions. He saw indeterminism ten years before the uncertainty principle. And he saw nonlocality as early as 1905, presenting it formally in 1927, but was ignored. In the 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper, he explored non- separability, which was dubbed “entanglement” by Schrödinger. The EPR paper has gone from being irrelevant to Einstein’s most cited work and the basis for today’s “second revolution in quantum mechanics.” In a radical revision of the history of quantum physics, Bob Doyle develops Einstein’s idea of objective reality to resolve several of today’s most puzzling quantum mysteries, including the two-slit experiment, quantum entanglement, and microscopic irreversibility. This book on the web informationphilosopher.com/einstein/ My God, He Plays Dice! How Albert Einstein Invented Most Of Quantum Mechanics Bob Doyle The Information Philosopher “beyond logic and language” First edition, 2019 © 2019, Bob Doyle, The Information Philosopher All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by electronic or mechanical means (including photo- copying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without the prior permission of The Information Philosopher. Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data (Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.) Names: Doyle, Bob, 1936- author. Title: My God, he plays dice! : how Albert Einstein invented most of quantum mechanics / Bob Doyle, the Information Philosopher. Description: First edition. | Cambridge, MA, USA : I-Phi Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: ISBN 9780983580249 | ISBN 9780983580256 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Einstein, Albert, 1879-1955--Influence. | Quantum theory. | Science--History. Classification: LCC QC174.13 .D69 2019 (print) | LCC QC174.13 (ebook) | DDC 530/.12--dc23 I-Phi Press 77 Huron Avenue Cambridge, MA, USA Dedication This book is dedicated to a handful of scholars who noticed that Albert Einstein’s early work on quantum mechanics had been largely ignored by the great “founders” of quantum theory, over- shadowed by his phenomenal creations of special and general relativity and by his dissatisfaction with “quantum reality.” Most notably I want to thank Leslie Ballentine, Frederik. J. Belinfante, David Cassidy, Carlo Cercigniani, Max Dresden, Arthur Fine, Gerald Holton, Don Howard, Max Jammer, Martin J. Klein, Thomas S. Kuhn, Cornelius Lanczos, Jagdish Mehra, Abraham Pais, Helmut Rechenberg, John C. Slater, John Stachel, A. Douglas Stone, Roger H. Stuewer, and B. L. van der Waerden. I also want to thank the many editors and translators of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, as well as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Princeton University Press for making Einstein’s work available online for scholars everywhere. I have purchased all the volumes of CPAE over the years for my own library, but I am delighted that all these critical documents are now available online for free. Information philosophy builds on the intersection of computers and communications. These two technologies will facilitate the sharing of knowledge around the world in the very near future, when almost everyone will have a smartphone and affordable access to the Internet and the World Wide Web. Information is like love. Giving it to others does not reduce it. It is not a scarce economic good. Sharing it increases the total information in human minds, the Sum of human knowledge. Information wants to be free. Bob Doyle ([email protected]) Cambridge, MA March, 2019 vi My God, He Plays Dice! Contents Contents vii Table of Contents Dedication v Preface xiii Questions to Consider xxii; Plausible, If Radical, Answers to Quantum Questions xxiv 1. Introduction 3 Is Reality Continuous or Discrete? 4; Absolute Principles of Physics 6; Probability, Entropy, and Information 7 2. Chance 11 The History of Chance 13 3. Matter 19 Boltzmann’s Philosophy 22 4. Light 25 Planck’s Discovery of the Blackbody Radiation Law 28; The Significance of Planck’s Quantum of Action 32; Comparison of Matter and Light Distribution Laws 33; The Ultraviolet Catastrophe 34; No Progress on Microscopic Irreversibility 37 5. Statistical Mechanics 39 What Did Statistics Mean for Einstein? 40; What Are the Fluctuations? 41; Had Gibbs Done Everything Before Einstein? 42 6. Light Quantum Hypothesis and Nonlocality 47 Photoelectric Effect 49; Entropies of Radiation and Matter 51; Nonlocality 52 7. Brownian Motion and Relativity 55 8. Specific Heat 59 9. Wave-Particle Duality 65 From Matter to Light to Matter 67 10. Bohr-Einstein Atom 71 Chance in Atomic Processes 77; An Independent Criticism of Bohr on Einstein 78 viii My God, He Plays Dice! 11. Transition Probabilities 81 12. Microscopic Irreversibility 87 The Origin of Microscopic Irreversibility 89; Detailed Balancing 92 13. A Nobel Prize and Experimental Confirmations 95 14. De Broglie Pilot Waves 99 15. Bose-Einstein Statistics 103 16. Bohr-Kramers-Slater 107 17. Matrix Mechanics 111 Heisenberg on Einstein’s Light Quanta 114 18. Wave Mechanics 119 19. Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics 123 Dirac’s Three Polarizers 140; The Mystery of the Oblique Polarizer 140; Objective Reality and Dirac’s “Manner of Speaking” 143; The Schrōdinger Equation 144; Dirac’s Principle of Superposition 144; Dirac’s Axiom of Measurement 146; Dirac’s Projection Postulate 147; Pauli’s Two Kinds of Measurement 149 20 Statistical Interpretation 153 21. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle 159 Heisenberg’s Microscope 160 22. Bohr Complementarity 165 Heisenberg’s Microscope Revisited 167; Bohr’s Uncertainty Derivation 168; Free Choice in Quantum Mechanics 169 23. Nonlocality at the 1927 Solvay Conference 171 “Collapse” of the Wave Function 179; The Two-Slit Experiment 180; Nature’s Choice and the Experimenter’s Choice 181 24. Copenhagen Interpretation 183 What Exactly Is in the Copenhagen Interpretation? 186; Opposition to the Copenhagen Interpretation 191 Contents ix 25. Von Neumann Measurement 195 The Measurement Problem 197; The Measurement Apparatus 198; TheSchnitt and Conscious Observer 200 26. Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen 205 Two Places or Paths at the Same Time? 207; Is Quantum Mechanics Complete or Incomplete? 210; EPR in the 21st Century 213 27. Nonseparability 215 Separability According to Quantum Theory 216 28. Schrödinger and His Cat 219 Superposition 221; Schrödinger’s Cat 222; How Does “Objective Reality” Resolve The Cat Paradox? 226 29. Entanglement and Symmetry 229 Einstein’s Introduction of a False Asymmetry? 230; What Did Einstein See? The Special Frame? 232; No Hidden Variables, but Hidden Constants! 233; Alice’s “Free Choice” of Spin Direction 234; Can Conservation Laws Do It All? 238; Pauli’s Kinds of Measurement Again 239; How Symmetry and Conservation Explain Entanglement 242 30. David Bohm’s Hidden Variables 247 No “Hidden Variables,” but Hidden Constants? 248; Problem of Irreversibility 251 31. Hugh Everett III’s Many Worlds 253 Information and Entropy 255; TheAppearance of Irreversibility in a Measurement 256; On the “Conscious Observer” 258; Bryce De Witt 260; Summary of Everett’s Ideas 260 32. John Bell’s Inequality 263 Bell’s Theorem 265; Experimental Tests of Bell’s Inequality 266; Bell’s “Shifty Split” 274; Are There Quantum Jumps? 275; John Bell Today 277 33. Feynman Two-Slit Experiment 279 Feynman’s Path-Integral Formulation of Quantum Mechanics 287 x My God, He Plays Dice! 34. Decoherence 289 Decoherence and the Measurement Problem 296; What Decoherence Gets Right 294 35. Einstein’s Principles 301 What Were They? 303; Absolute Principles 305 36. Einstein’s Quantum Statistics 307 Elementary Particles Are Not Independent 308; 37. Einstein's Continuum 311 God Created the Integers 312 38. Einstein’s Field Theory 315 Castle In The Air 316 39. Einstein’s Objective Reality 321 Irreversibility and Objective Reality 323 40. Einstein's Quantum Theory 327 41. Einstein’s Cosmology 343 The Cosmological Constant 343; The Flatness Problem 343; The Problem of Missing Mass (Dark Matter) 345; Dark Energy (Is the Expansion Accelerating?) 346; The Information Paradox 347 42. Einstein’s Mistakes 349 Fields and Particles 349; Quantum Physics 350; Cosmology 352 43. Albert Einstein & Information