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Comment by qiskit | Hacker News Reader

> Einstein and the quantum pioneers

Einstein wasn't a 'quantum pioneer'. Einstein was a proponent of classical physics and against quantum physics.

His Nobel Prize was for his early quantum work (explaining the photoelectric effect). He was a major participant at the first Solvay conference. Bose-Einstein statistics didn't get that name just because someone though it looked cool.

He of course fully knew that the world is quantum, not classical. His beef with the mainstream QM past the mid to late '20s was with the Copenhagen interpretation. Einstein believed that a complete theory would have realism and so Copenhagen could not be the complete theory.

Solving the photoelectric effect gave birth to the field. He just didn't like the monster he had created.

No. He was working on the photoelectric effect because "the field" already existed. And he was working on it from a classical physics standpoint. What makes quantum physics revolutionary is it's non-classical nature. That's what einstein was against - quantum physics as we know it today. Einstein was a life long classic physicist. His relativity was grounded on classical physics. It's why many are working towards a quantum theory of gravity.

If you had even the shallowest understanding of what Einstein's contributions to physics are, you wouldn't make such comments... He literally got his Nobel prize for photoelectric effect in 2021.

That isn't true. Einstein's "breakout" paper was on the Photoelectric effect. He wasn't a fan of probabilistic interpretations of quantum mechanics but it's not accurate to say that he didn't have a hand in it

I didn’t read that as intending to include Einstein in that group.

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