'I know he rigged this somehow'

You’re watching one of those card tricks. The dealer says, “Ok, pick any card.” You pick the five of hearts.

Now you watch the dealer take your card, return it to the deck, and then he reshuffles the deck, a few times; then he cuts the deck, reshuffles again, then lets you cut the deck, reshuffles once more, and then, with the deck in his hand, he nonchalantly pulls one card out of the stack, he doesn't even look at it but asks, "Is this your card?", turns it over for you to see – and it’s your five of hearts.

Well, it's all pretty clever, and you're smiling, and you don’t know how he did it, but you're sure he’s rigged this somehow. You know this because a deck of cards doesn’t work that way. Somehow he’s been able to keep track of that five of hearts from the beginning, and the seeming randomness at the end is just an illusion.

And this is what Einstein is saying with the two particles that seem to be tracking each other. “That can’t happen by accident, the universe doesn’t work that way,” says Einstein, “so somehow this system is rigged and, from the beginning, these particles are able to keep track of each other. The seeming entanglement at the end is just an illusion, just a card trick, because somehow they were in sync by means of ‘hidden variables’ right from the start.”

But Bohr says, “No, the universe is not like we thought it was. It's not Newtonian at its core. There is no rigging, no predetermined outcome, through hidden manipulation.”

In fact, Bohr might say, “The quantum five of hearts doesn’t even exist until we go looking for it.”

Editor's note: Einstein created the “EPR paradox” to highlight what he insisted was a fatal flaw in Bohr’s theory. What was the fatal flaw? The particles seemed to have the potential to “communicate” with each other faster than the speed of light. But Einstein’s Special Relativity said that nothing can travel faster than light. Therefore, said Einstein, Bohr’s theory has to be wrong, or at least “incomplete”. But this is circular reasoning. Einstein begins with the premise “I can’t be wrong” and, on the strength of this, declares Bohr’s theory to be flawed. But the primacy of the Special Theory is also under review here and so you can’t use what is being questioned as basis of certitude. Further, the assertion that particles are communicating faster than light is just a presumption. There could be another reason for their seeming oneness; that is, beyond “hidden variables” – which, as it turns out, seems to be the case. The particles are not yet real particles until a measurement is taken; as such, there is no communication between them because they are not separated but part of one wave-function.