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How Einstein Lost the Battle To Explain Quantum Reality

Long-time Slashdot reader lee1 shares "an interesting essay on the history of orthodoxy in quantum mechanics," published this week in Nature. Its title? "'Shut up and calculate': how Einstein lost the battle to explain quantum reality." [T]he views of Danish physicist Niels Bohr came to domin...

My latest book Quantum Drama, co-written with science historian John Heilbron, explores the origins of this myth and its role in motivating the singular personalities that would go on to challenge it. When learning quantum mechanics as a graduate student at Harvard University in the 1950s, US physicist N. David Mermin recalled vivid memories of the responses that his conceptual enquiries elicited from his professors, whom he viewed as 'agents of Copenhagen'. The book argues that actually the physics world suffered from "a subtly different kind of orthodoxy" — an indifference to "foundational questions" outside the mainstream — but that the "myth" motivated projects and experiments.

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