Brian Greene and Alan Alda Discuss Why Einstein Hated Quantum Mechanics

we thought it would be fun to spend a few minutes just a few minutes um Brian Greene and I having a little conversation about mostly about the science behind what was happening in his life and all these moments the world here's Brian Greene come come let's let's bring our chairs a little closer together the interesting thing to me was he was searching all through his life for simplicity he couldn't have had a more chaotic personal life and he was looking for things to pull together in the universe and I mean you could I guess you could do armchair psychoanalysis and say he needed to find that because he couldn't find it in life but what was the who was the unified field theory he was working on I mean the the formula at the end were the numbers and and symbols that he that we saw on the screen literally was what he wrote in a notebook just before he fell asleep for the last time he was writing trying to figure out a theory that would unify all the forces that he was aware of right up until the last minute what what is a unified field theory well I think he described it really well I mean the goal of physics the goal of science is to find the deep patterns in nature and the deepest of patterns you imagine will be able to describe the broadest spectrum of phenomenon so he desperately wanted to find a single framework that would put gravity the force of gravity that he understood well from the general theory of relativity wanted to meld that with the other force that he was well aware of which was the electromagnetic force so the goal was to put those two forces together and showed that they're basically the same thing described by the same method Oh structure so at that time were they the two forces that he was aware of gravity in Electra meant so that means gravity in and light and all the other electricity magnetism light gravity wanted to put all together now the thing is even at that time he didn't pay that much attention to it it was known it was becoming known that there are other forces so there's the nuclear force the strong nuclear force it all danced against that some of that happened during his lifetime right what did that bother him did he think oh I got more forces I have to put together you would think so but um but no but you know I think the general belief and we'd have to like check with Walter Isaacson's book right but I think the general belief is he didn't pay that much attention to these other forces and we can even go further there the thing that he was really leaving out a deep sense was quantum physics quantum mechanics even though he wrote the first paper on quantum mechanics oh one of those 1905 papers was on the photoelectric effect that's the paper for which he won the Nobel Prize not the relativity papers and that's the paper that ultimately yields quantum mechanics but sort of like giving birth to an unruly child you don't like how they grow up he got completely turned off by quantum eyes quantum mechanics he viewed as the wrong way of describing nature and he thought the unified theory would do an end run around quantum mechanics so all this stuff that he didn't like he would say that was just a temporary resting place the unified theory would make quantum mechanics unnecessary how did quantum mechanics come out of the photoelectric abut what is the photoelectric effect yeah so the photoelectric effect is the recognition that light itself which had been described as a wave from the time of Maxwell an electromagnetic wave could actually be described in terms of little tiny particles that light was actually made up of what we call quanta photons and that move recognizing this deep relationship between a wave-like phenomenon and a particle-like phenomenon ultimately by the mid-20 and by the 30s gives rise to quantum mechanics so did he quantum mechanics as I understand it sort of acknowledges that it's the light and other electromagnetic waves are both waves and particles probably because probably is the language of quantum yeah that that is what it is so so quantum mechanics basically shows that whereas Newton and everybody before quantum physics including Einstein said what physics is about is tell me how things are now and I'll use my equations to predict how they will be in five minutes or an hour from now if they're here now then they'll do things and that'll happen in this and then you can know exactly where it'll be later that's right in quantum mechanics comes along and says that's the wrong way of thinking about things it says the best you can ever do in any experiment is predict the probability the likelihood of getting one outcome or another you cannot say the electron will be here in five minutes you can say there's a 42 percent chance it will be there and a 36 percent chance it will be over there and so on and that's the best you can do and this way of thinking about nature even though it was borne out by experiment just didn't sit well with Einstein well he didn't actually talk about probabilities did he and oh yeah he did no he really kicked off quantum mechanical he had to embrace quantum mechanics because it was doing such a fantastic job of explaining data but he basically wanted to take a sledgehammer to it and smash it to pieces and by 1935 one of his other important papers was basically trying to prove mathematically the quantum mechanics could not be the full story because it predicted such things that couldn't possibly be true to any rational thinking person like what like what you do over here having an effect on something over there quantum entanglement but by 1980 certainly by today we know that entanglement is real so this crazy feature of quantum mechanics that he tried to use against the theory itself is actually borne out by data today and they're from them from that last paragraph you just spoke came those those two famous sayings of his about entanglement he said that spooky action at a distance spook and used the word spook that's what the German word for spooky is so the other one of that is objection his objection to quantum mechanics being that God doesn't play dice with the universe yes and that wasn't lovable excite of things but that if everything is a probability and nothing is that definite then it really goes against the idea that things can be set and solid why did he stick to that was it was he was stuck in an old paradigm was it emotional was it philosophical why couldn't he go where the numbers led him well I think he was a revolutionary in some ways and in other ways he wasn't in other ways he was really very tied to a philosophical perspective on reality and he had achieved great things as a young man I mean think about it he just sat there with his pen and his paper and it worked out space and time and special relativity had worked out gravity and general relativity this kind of achievement just reinforced that that was the way to understand nature this completely classical perspective with no quantum mechanics insight then all of a sudden these other people come along and say that's the wrong way of thinking about nature that's a tough thing too but that's not I was tired I ain't no I wouldn't say so no he i would decide that he was tired he was just so married to a particular perspective on the world and it was an unshakable belief in the coherence of a classical perspective and i think that was something he just could not give up it's interesting when you talk about how he was sitting there doing it with a pencil and paper and his imagination again that that other saying that's often attributed to him that imagination is more important than knowledge it's hard to believe that he would say that except he accomplished so much with his imagination based on the knowledge he had and in the piece tonight he talks about that moment when he imagined a man falling off a building happiest thought of his life he is thought of his life why why was that the happiest thought because that sounds like he's saying it's the most central image to all his thinking yeah that was the key idea that propelled him toward the general theory of relativity see gravity is a difficult subject it's hard to even figure out a way in to a description of the force of gravity at the level that Einstein was searching for what he realized was that a certain kind of motion freely falling motion in essence counteracts gravity can eliminate gravity which means in any situation where there's gravity if you don't want to have to deal with it directly just execute a certain kind of motion jump out a window and then gravity goes away what you jump out the window gravity makes a quick entrance actually it actually doesn't it doesn't so you jump out the window what actually happens from Einsteins perspective is that the ground is just rushing up and hitting you you're not being pulled down by gravity from Einsteins perspective I mean when Newton was sitting there under the tree according to Einstein it was not that the apple fell on his head his head rushed up and hit the Apple and that's on Stein's view now I can show you this thing yeah I'm right okay you can cure brink you bring my little water thingy out there whoever may be backstage listen to us right here we go so so this idea of of getting rid of gravity by going into freely falling motion can be illustrated by a little experiment so I'm gonna do it cuz I don't want you to get all wet so so what I'm gonna do is let me describe it first when I take off this cap air pressure is going to be entering into the bottle and water is gonna spew out a few holes that I have here because gravity is gonna pull down on the water and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna let the bottle go into freefall and watch that the water won't spray out any longer right so that's what you should look for okay here we go all right right so here goes to water oh sorry about that right so um now watch when I let it go holy moly right one more time gravity goes away right yeah there it is all right now okay that's a great trick yeah this can Keeney's die can you explain why we just saw what we saw yeah so as the bottle is in freefall it no longer feels the force of gravity right I mean another way of thinking about it that maybe is even you know more visceral than this little demonstration is if you are standing on a scale right you look down you see whatever you know 150 160 pounds for me something like that right if I jump out of the window with a scale at my feet and I look down on it what does the reading go to it goes to zero because the scale and me we are moving together so in that sense I'm no longer pushing on the scale I'm no longer experiencing gravity as I did when I'm standing here in the stage so if you can counter gravity if you can cancel it out by going into this motion Ayten really the reverse was also true you could mock up gravity you could simulate gravity by accelerating too so that's where you get to a car turning exactly and you still you feel them you know it's no longer what you feel in an elevator which is nothing yes and even though you and the elevator were falling that's right if you cut the cable of an elevator then indeed you and the elevator will fall together just like the water and the bottle fall together just like the scale and my feet fall together you don't feel anything the exact reverse of that is now take an elevator in empty space no gravity empty space and pull up on the cable making the elevator accelerate in that direction if you're in that elevator you will now feel your feet pressing against the floor because the floor is pushing up against you you will have simulated gravity why is that important Einstein understands motion really well but he doesn't understand gravity now he has reduced gravity to motion accelerated motion that gives him a way in and it does take him a good eight years to fill in all the details but that yields the general theory of relativity Einstein didn't understand gravity very well he didn't in 1907 1915 he makes this idea and parlays it into a single equation that describes the force of gravity in a way that had never been achieved so 1915 was different from 1905 because in 1905 he had a very special sense of what gravitation was no he ignored gravity 1900 I was just really Tibbets racial rates only took into account motion that was not speeding up not slowing down no accelerated motion right when he includes accelerated motion all of a sudden gravity comes into the story for free in the manner that we're just describing because accelerated motion makes gravity makes it all of a sudden appear even though it wasn't there necessarily to begin with and that's the window into the general theory of relativity ok ok the quiz you have been a wonderful audience and it's been really fun to be with you tonight share this evening and thanks so much thank you Brian for help smarty you

Channel: World Science Festival

Views: 1,065,890

Rating: 4.9105906 out of 5

Keywords: Albert Einstein, Brian Greene and Alan Alda Discuss Why Einstein Hated Quantum Mechanics, quantum mechanics, Special Theory of Relativity, God does not play dice with the universe, New York City, NYC, world science festival, short, World, Science, Festival, 2014

Id: HneFM-BvZj4

Length: 15min 14sec (914 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 10 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/OB-14]

thank you!!!!!

[u/iemfi]

He would probably be a lot happier today with MWI.

[u/echo4joe]

If I can take a shot at it... Weight X Mass divided by gravity = zero. I'm in space!

[u/_aidan]

I think the Einstein didn't so much "hate Quantum Mechanics", but rather he didn't really accept it in its presented form. Quantum mechanics, even today, comes with very counter-intuitive results, some of which are still not well understood. This counter-intuitiveness is mainly due to a lack of a full understanding of what is really happening.

Imagine if we didn't have the laws of thermodynamics and someone were to suggest to you that if you increase pressure, then temperature will rise. You'll probably think it would be very counter-intuitive - why would pressure have anything to do with temperature?? You might even accept the idea that there is some correlation between the two measurements, considering you can perform experiments and get somewhat predictable results. But every now and then you start getting strange results and you have no idea why - its "spooky"!

Then someone comes along and teaches you the Laws of Thermodynamics and the relationship between temperature, pressure, and volume. Wow! Now all your experiments make much more sense and even the spooky results just end up being a result of no one taking volume into consideration. Not only that, but you finally understand why pressure and temperature are correlated together.

Quantum mechanics (and quantum entanglement) is sort of like that right now - and Einstein was hoping to go beyond that spooky nature and find something larger that better explained what was happening.