Comment by oofbey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oofbey | Hacker News Reader

It’s quite strange that the abstract implies Einstein is a founder of QM. More the opposite I think. Einstein remained deeply skeptical of many fundamental aspects of QM - believing in hidden variable theory through his famous statement “God does not play dice with the universe” which was only proven false after his death through experimental measurements of the Bell inequalities.

This paper describes another set of inequalities similar to the Bell inequalities, but testing whether QM requires complex numbers or not, instead of whether there are hidden variables that can explain things like superposition.

The statement in the abstract I’m referring to is this:

> This has puzzled countless physicists, including the fathers of the theory, for whom a real version of quantum theory, in terms of real operators, seemed much more natural.[3]

The reference [3] is to a letter by Einstein. Maybe I’m nitpicking words, but scientists tend to spend a lot of time getting the abstracts to their papers right. Any ideas why they would write it this way?

Reference [3] is a letter from Schrödinger to Lorentz. I would also argue that Einstein had one of the deepest understandings of QM at the time. Everyone knew that the theory is weird, but with the EPR paper Einstein managed to pinpoint quite well where this weirdness shows up. It was also quite reasonable to assume that local hidden variables exist 40 years before a violation of Bell's inequality could be experimentally demonstrated.

Einstein is considered a founder (1 of 3) of QM because he was the first to described light as quanta, and won the Nobel prize for it. It's ok to be skeptical, even of your own hypotheses/theories.

You've got a naive way of looking at Einstein's skepticism towards the foundations of QM. He wasn't like one of the modern day quacks trying to disprove QM or SR/GR. He helped to build QM and got his Nobel prize for the photoelectric effect which showed that light was quantized and essentially discovered the photon. His argument with QM was that it had to be incomplete in the same sense that Galilean relativity was correct but incomplete, and he didn't accept that physics could be non-local. By applying that principle he proposed the EPR paradox which led to Bell's inequality and the Aspect experiment. He bet wrong on the outcome of that experiment, but it wouldn't have happened without his theoretical work in first proposing the experiment. The fact that he guessed the outcome of the experiment wrong is almost irrelevant, although in our culture of boosting the profile of people who get lucky and guess correctly that is probably difficult to see.

Einstein famously helped solve the ultraviolet catastrophe by "inventing" photons as the mechanism for the quantization of light proposed by Planck. He even got the Nobel prize for it. So he was very much a founder of quantum mechanic.

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