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Quantum Mechanics


Bohr-Einstein debates
 

EPR

Bohr's reply

 


 

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Bohr asserted that the two particles in question should be viewed as a unified system. “We have to do with the wholeness that is completely foreign to classical physics,” he said.

 

 Wikipedia:

Bohr's response to the EPR paper was published in the Physical Review later in 1935. He argued that EPR had reasoned fallaciously. Because measurements of position and of momentum are complementary, making the choice to measure one excludes the possibility of measuring the other. Consequently, a fact deduced regarding one arrangement of laboratory apparatus could not be combined with a fact deduced by means of the other, and so, the inference of predetermined position and momentum values for the second particle was not valid. Bohr concluded that EPR's "arguments do not justify their conclusion that the quantum description turns out to be essentially incomplete."

 

from the documentary “Atomic Physics and Reality”:

John Bell: “There is a famous sentence [from Bohr], something like, ‘Although there is no influence of one experiment on the other, there is a change in the very conditions of the possibilities of knowledge’ … a very well-turned sentence which, I believe, Bohr took a great deal of trouble in formulating and whose meaning is absolutely obscure to me. But, what I get out of Bohr’s replay, and certainly what Einstein got out of Bohr’s reply, was simply the insistence that we have no right to a picture of the atomic world.”

Editor’s note: What did Bohr mean with “there is a change in the very conditions of the possibilities of knowledge”? An altering of the “possibilities of knowledge” suggests that reality is a plastic entity, moldable, non-rigid. It seems to me that Bohr caught a glimpse of the fluidic potential of Nature itself, and man’s expansive, creative capacities to negotiate it.

 

 

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