Einstein was wrong 2022 Nobel Prize confirms God rolled the dice

 

The three winners of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, have made outstanding contributions to quantum entanglement and the verification of Bell's inequality. This means that the Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes the correctness of quantum mechanics and that new technologies based on quantum mechanics are on the right path.

 

Zeilinger said in an interview after winning the prize that I am sorry, Mr. Einstein, that your conclusions were wrong. What does all this have to do with Einstein? It starts with the long-running Bo-ai controversy.

 

01The Bo-love century controversy

 

Bohr and Einstein were good friends, and both were the pioneers and founders of quantum mechanics, but their interpretation of quantum theory was unyielding. The first round took place at the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927.

 

It was a meeting of the physics community. Of the 29 people in the conference group photo, 17 were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

 

 

The two sides of the Boeing-love controversy were equally matched in numbers. Bohr's Copenhagen School had the numerical advantage, but three figures on the opponent's side carried more weight than one another: de Broglie, Schrödinger, and Einstein.

 

At the formal meeting stage, Bohr and the Copenhagen School's interpretation of quantum theory dominated overwhelmingly. Einstein's challenges were usually raised outside the formal meetings, while most of the debates and exchanges between the two schools took place at the dinner table before and after the daily meetings.

 

Einstein's starting point was the three assumptions in classical mechanics - conservation laws, determinism, and locality. In general, there is little controversy over conservation laws. However, the uncertainty principle proposed by Heisenberg violated the assumption of determinism, which Einstein could not tolerate.

 

Heisenberg discovered in 1925 that the motion of electrons actually has no trajectory to speak of, because the position and momentum of electrons cannot be determined at the same time: the smaller the uncertainty of position, the larger the uncertainty of momentum, and vice versa. Heisenberg thus proposed the uncertainty principle.

 

Einstein's view can be summarized by his famous saying "God does not roll the dice", that is, the nature of the world is not random, which is consistent with the view of classical mechanics. The seemingly unexplained random phenomena are due to "hidden variables" that have not yet been discovered, and once we identify these hidden variables, randomness will cease to exist.

 

However, the Copenhagen School argued that the randomness of the microscopic world is intrinsic and essential, and that there are no hidden variables that are more deeply hidden than the probability of the "collapse of the wave function" to some eigenstate.

 

At the end of the conference, the two schools of thought remained divided, and neither was convinced by the other.

 

Three years later, at the Sixth Solvay Conference, the two schools of thought again argued. Einstein presented his famous "photon box" thought experiment. The experimental setup was a sealed box containing a luminous substance with a small hole cut in it, and a mechanical clock at the mouth of the hole to precisely control the opening time of the flap. At the same time, the box was suspended from a precision spring scale to measure its mass.

 

 

The experiment starts by measuring the mass of the box once, then controlling the opening of the shutter for a short time to allow a photon to escape, and then measuring the mass again when the shutter is closed. Let the reduced mass of the box be m and the energy of the photon that is E=mc2.

 

Einstein believed that in this experiment, time is measured by the mechanical clock control, the energy of the photon can be obtained by the spring scale measurement of the mass difference, the two are carried out independently, without interference, theoretically can be accurately measured. To show that the uncertainty principle that time and energy cannot be accurately measured at the same time is not valid, the Bohr school of thought is incorrect, and quantum mechanics is not self-consistent.

 

Einstein's photon box experiment left Bohr speechless on the spot. But after only one night, Bohr used Einstein's own general theory of relativity to point out the defects of the photon box experiment.

 

Bohr pointed out that: after the photon ran out, the box hanging on the spring scale became lighter in mass, that is, it would shift upwards, and according to the general theory of relativity, if the clock gravity direction is displaced, the speed of the clock will change. In this way, the time read out by the mechanical clock in the box will be changed because of this photon run out. In other words, using this device, if the energy of the photon is to be measured, the moment when the photon escapes cannot be precisely controlled.

 

Einstein was stunned by Bohr's retort and has since given up the idea of attacking quantum mechanics from this aspect of the uncertainty principle. "Quantum theory may be self-consistent," he said, "but it is at least incomplete."

 

Bohr was indeed disturbed that night by Einstein's "photon box" problem, and it continued to haunt him for years afterward. It is said that at the time of Bohr's death in 1962, the blackboard in his studio still had Einstein's photon box drawn on it.

 

Einstein was unable to attend the Seventh Solvay Conference in 1933 because he had been driven out of Europe by the Nazis and was just about to accept a professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA. Without Einstein present, neither de Broglie nor Schrödinger liked to debate with people, so this year's Solvay Conference saw Bohr's Copenhagen School sing a one-man show, and all was well.

 

Finally, in 1935, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen published their jointly signed paper in the journal Physical Review. Einstein conceived the famous "EPR feint" (E, P and R stand for the three authors of the paper). This was the third round of his argument with Bohr's school.

 

 

In his paper, Einstein used for the first time a superpowerful weapon, later named by Schrödinger as "quantum entanglement".

 

02The Final Judgment: Bell's Inequality

 

Yes, quantum entanglement is actually the work of Einstein, Schrödinger and others.

 

Einstein conceived a thought experiment describing the decay of a large unstable particle into two small particles (A and B): the large particle splits into two identical small particles. The small particles gain kinetic energy and fly out in two opposite directions. If the spin of particle A is up, the spin of particle B must be down in order to keep the overall spin conservation and vice versa.

 

According to quantum mechanics, the two particles should be in a superposition state before the measurement, such as "A up, B down" and "A down, B up" each with a certain probability of superposition (e.g., 50% each). Then, we measure A, and the state of A collapses in an instant. If the state of A collapses to up, the state of B must be down because of conservation.

 

But if A and B are already very far apart, say tens of thousands of light years, according to the theory of quantum mechanics, B should also be up and down with half probability, so why is it able to do always choose down at the moment when A collapses?

 

Is there some way for A and B to "communicate" with each other in time? Even assuming that they can perceive each other, the signal between them would need to span tens of thousands of light years in a single instant, and this transmission speed has exceeded the speed of light, and this super distance effect is not allowed by the existing physical knowledge. Thus, Einstein argued: this constitutes a feint.

 

Einstein's emphasis on the impossibility of a hyperdistance means that he insisted on the "local nature" of classical theory. Quantum mechanics had already denied determinism, which Einstein did not recognize. Now, if even localization is to be discarded, this is something Einstein could never agree with, so in his article he calls the instantaneous interaction between two particles "ghostly hyperdistance interaction".

 

After reading the EPR paper, Schrödinger wrote a letter to Einstein in German, in which he first used the term Verschränkung (meaning entanglement), in order to describe the association that two temporarily coupled particles maintain with each other after they are no longer coupled in the EPR thought experiment.

 

The EPR feint was also echoed by Bohr. He argued that because two particles form a mutually entangled whole, only the whole described by the wave function makes sense, and they cannot be considered as two individuals far apart - since they are coherently related, they need not pass any information between them.

 

Einstein absolutely could not accept Bohr's odd argument, and even though Bohr's theory prevailed in the following two or three decades, and quantum theory was developing rapidly in all branches, bringing great technological revolution to human society, Einstein still stubbornly insisted on his classical beliefs and opposed the Copenhagen School's interpretation of quantum theory.

 

In 1955, Einstein passed away, and Bohr also passed away a few years later. But their differences remained inconclusive until 1964, when the British physicist John Bell proposed the famous "Bell's inequality".

 

Einstein's side insisted that the randomness of quantum entanglement was a superficial phenomenon and that there might be a "hidden variable" behind it, and Bell himself supported this view. He tried to prove that Einstein's view on hidden variables was correct by experiment.

 

 

Bell hypothesized an experiment shown above. According to birth determinism, the direction of polarization of these photons is already determined, and the measurement of one photon is independent of the measurement of another photon. However, in quantum mechanics, the measurement result of one photon necessarily affects the measurement result of another photon.

 

For example, do four experiments by placing the left and right polarizers at the angles (0°, 0°), (30°, 0°), (0°, -30°), and (30°, -30°), respectively. In the first case, all photons can pass through the polarizer. In the second three cases, the polarizer of each side is selected separately. The fourth case, is that the polarizers on both sides are rotated.

 

In simple terms, if the measurement of one photon is independent of the measurement of another photon, then the result of rotating both polarizers ≤ the sum of the results of rotating each side of the polarizer separately, which is the Bell inequality.

 

However, according to quantum theory, the measurement result of one photon must affect the measurement result of the other photon. Then, there is a situation where the result of rotating both sides of the polarizer > the sum of the results of rotating each side of the polarizer separately.

 

That is, if the inequality holds, Einstein wins, and if the inequality does not hold, Bohr wins. Thus, Bell's inequality transforms the thought experiment in the EPR feint proposed by Einstein and others into a real and feasible physical experiment.

 

Although Bell's original intention was to support Einstein and identify the hidden variables in quantum systems, his inequality led to experimental results that backfired. In the decades that followed, all experimental results of Bell's tests were biased in favor of quantum mechanics. The three winners of this year's Nobel Prize in physics were all leaders in this later series of work.

 

In 1972, physicist John Clauser and his collaborator Stuart Friedman, became the first to experimentally verify Bell's inequality. The experimental results violated Bell's inequality and proved the correctness of quantum mechanics.

 

In 1982, Alain Aspect and others at the University of Paris XI, with the help of Bell, improved Clauser and Friedman's Bell's theorem experiment and succeeded in plugging some of the major holes. The results of this experiment, which also violated Bell's inequality, proved the nonlocal nature of quantum mechanics.

 

In 1998, Anton Zeilinger's quantum state invisible transport experiment achieved a "breakthrough in the field of quantum information experiment", which is recognized as the pioneering work in the field of quantum information experiment, together with Roentgen's discovery of X-rays, Einstein's establishment of relativity and other major research results that have influenced the world. This experiment is recognized as a pioneering work in the field of quantum information experiments, together with Röntgen's discovery of X-rays, Einstein's establishment of the theory of relativity and other major research results that have influenced the world, was selected by the journal Nature as "21 classic papers of physics in the century.

 

Einstein proposed quantum entanglement in order to prove that Bohr was wrong, but it was not expected that more and more experiments would prove the correctness of quantum mechanics. After decades of development, quantum mechanics and information science have combined to produce quantum information science, which has become the most cutting-edge science and technology field in the 21st century, and has gradually moved from theory to application.