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‘Shut up and calculate’: how Einstein lost the battle to explain quantum reality

By suppressing questions they considered too ‘philosophical’, post-war physicists created an unquestioning orthodoxy that influences science to this day.
By
  1. Jim Baggott

    1. Jim Baggott is a science writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. He is co-author with John Heilbron of Quantum Drama.

Quantum cryptography. Eye of an observer reflected in a mirror in quantum cryptography apparatus.

For entangled particles, a change in one instantly affects the other, no matter how far apart they are. Credit: Volker Steger/SPL

Quantum mechanics is an extraordinarily successful scientific theory, on which much of our technology-obsessed lifestyles depend. It is also bewildering. Although the theory works, it leaves physicists chasing probabilities instead of certainties and breaks the link between cause and effect. It gives us particles that are waves and waves that are particles, cats that seem to be both alive and dead, and lots of spooky quantum weirdness around hard-to-explain phenomena, such as quantum entanglement.

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Nature 629, 29-32 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01216-z

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 25 April 2024: An earlier version of this Essay misnamed the Institute for Advanced Study.

References

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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