Physicist Lee Smolin on Einstein's Unfinished Revolution in Quantum Physics: Questions to the Author

Quantum mechanics is a well-established science. The case is closed and thank you very much – or so much argue.

Thanks to the pioneering work of the 1920s, many people think that we now know everything we will need to know about movement at the atomic or subatomic scale. According to the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his followers, we can affirm either the exact position of an atomic particle, or its trajectory, but we can not do both at the same time. This kind of prediction can only be probabilistic, never absolutely accurate.

The theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, of the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics in Toronto, has spent his entire career questioning this view. Smolin believes that Bohr's triumph is an example of a charisma that stifles legitimate dissent, even from such prominent dissidents as Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger.

Related: 8 mysteries of modern astronomy that scientists still can not explain

(Image: © Penguin Press)

Today, Smolin, in the footsteps of Albert Einstein and pursuing a long tradition including other physicists, including David Bohm, is seeking a theory to "supplement" quantum physics by allowing accurate descriptions and no fuzzy probabilities. Smolin has a "realistic" perspective, as opposed to the "anti-realist" view of Bohr and his acolytes. Smolin exposes his point of view in "The unfinished revolution of Einstein"(Penguin Press, April 2019) Space.com has contacted Smolin to discuss the book, how new ideas become dominant in science and what it is up to now.

Space.com: What is the difference between realistic and anti-realistic approaches to Quantum mechanics?

Lee Smolin: For me, the difference between a realistic about quantum phenomena and a non-realistic one is, as a realist, to believe that there is a complete story, and that there is a complete description, that we can get of any atomic process, of any nuclear process, of everything that happens in the subatomic world. Quantum mechanics does not give such a complete description of each process individually and therefore can not be complete. We must find a deeper theory beyond. Quantum mechanics is a step towards understanding subatomic physicsbut this is not the last step. The work therefore consists in deepening and inventing or discovering a better theory that gives a complete description.

If you are what we call an anti-realist, then you think that quantum mechanics such as it was written in the 1920s is perhaps the final theory, and there is no motivation to look deeper.

Space.com: You are referring to people who are looking for the completion of quantum theory as "naive realists" because their views do not need complicated justifications. Can you elaborate on this term?

Smolin: Naive means really sophisticated. Naive means that you have heard all the fundamental objections to the idea that we can give a complete description of the world as it is, reject them and keep it as a goal to understand nature completely and as if we were not here . Science is a description of nature that is supposed to be objective and not imposed by our experiences, ideas or beliefs.

Space.com: Does "naïve" mean being completely open to new ideas and beliefs?

Smolin: Completely open? People forget that physics, like any science, has a history and a tradition. Let us take a simple idea as momentum, which should be understood in the context of all the discussions that have taken place since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the principle of inertia, the principle of relativity, etc. You can not explain a concept such as momentum without being immersed in the whole history of the concept.

Space.com: Your book is clear and lucid, and is understandable by people with varying levels of basic knowledge. What is your writing process?

Smolin: Why thanks! I take this as a compliment. I have a lot of experience and a lot of practice in teaching modern physics to the subconscious. In different universities, I have often taught courses in "physics for the humanities" or "physics for poets". I therefore have a lot of experience in developing different teaching strategies to use in teaching quantum physics or relativity to the layperson.

A book like this has several audiences simultaneously. I address myself to experts and colleagues, but I mainly address lay people. And the first layman who counts is the publisher. I always insist on working with a publisher with a degree in literature, humanities or history, not a degree in science. I also have several test drives that have no science education. They all pushed me to clarify, clarify, clarify and if necessary rewrite the book. This book in particular has been the subject of three complete rewrites. So to speak, there was nothing left on the floor of the cutting room. The first whole project was completely abandoned and reconceptualized, and the result was a much better book, in my opinion.

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Space.com: Since it was completely rewritten several times, how long did it take to write the book?

Smolin: Writing is not my daily job; my daily job is that of theoretical physicist. But in my free time, so to speak, about three years. There will be a month or six weeks in which I will work mainly on the book, then six months will go by and think about it, and then I will dive again for three weeks or a month. So it was like that over a period of three years.

Space.com: Your book details the history of quantum physics at the beginning of the 20th century. Why has Niels Bohr's anti-realist quantum revolution become the dominant vision – in the blink of an eye?

Smolin: There were two things that acted simultaneously. One of them, and most importantly, is the impressive experimental success. In less than 30 years, humanity has reconciled itself to the idea that matter is made up of atoms to become a complete theory of atomic physics. And it worked substantially to explain the spectrum [the rainbow of colors produced by separating components of light by their wavelength], forces, chemical compounds – everything! Then very quickly, nuclear physics, particle physics, star functioning – astrophysics.

The experimental success was therefore amazing and fast. Measured against this, even people like Einstein, Schrödinger and de Broglie, dissenting, said: "Wait a minute! The foundations are messy!" All of this could be swept under the carpet.

That was the first thing. The second thing is the prestige and charisma of Niels Bohr, with the support of the Danish government and the Carlsberg brewery, to create a center where everything has come to him. His charismatic personality, very hypnotic, could influence the thoughts of a generation of people emerging from a terrible war. [World War I]. So it's a lot of different things at a time.

Space.com: And other theories could not move forward.

It is surprising that De Broglie's theory of pilot waves – even though it could be defended by Einstein, by De Broglie, and in some ways by Schrödinger – had no impact, even though it was not You're welcome. They were world-famous characters with Nobel prizes, who had done science, but their dissent could nevertheless be ignored for several generations.

[Pilot wave theory, which Louis de Broglie developed in the 1920s and David Bohm expanded in the 1950s, asserts that electrons encompass  both particles and waves and that particles move in the direction that waves guide them. It is deterministic, not probabilistic.]

I think scientists are human beings and we are influenced by all kinds of things, from unconscious prejudices to the ambition of social forces. The history of quantum mechanics becomes a story that deserves to be contemplated, but it is not an unusual story.

Related: Do black holes create new universes? Q & A with physicist Lee Smolin

Space.com: How did your peers react to your book?

Smolin: Nothing has been surprising so far. My opinions are well known to the physics community. As provocative as it may seem in the structure of the book, no discussion has been debated so thoroughly by physicists.

The only thing that is new is the last chapters. I took a big risk to put my current job on the table.

Space.com: Describe your current job.

Smolin: The most important thing I do in my new job is to take the role of non-localization seriously.[[[[No localization refers to the ability of objects to influence the actions of other objects far apart in space and time.]If you want to give a complete and realistic description of what happens when two or more particles are interacting and are what we call "entanglements," the way you choose to manipulate one of the particles can influence the others, even if they are very far apart. And that means you have to take seriously that influences are not limited by the idea that things only affect what's close to them.

So I take this seriously and try to make a theory in which these quantum entanglements are fundamental and the notion of emerging space. The space does not exist; we can make an emergent and approximate description of space in the same way that we use pressure and temperature to describe a gas.

I am not the only person trying to develop this theory. The idea that space can come out of entanglement is an old idea that is generating new momentum in people like Roger Penrose. My theory is that space can be emerging, but that time is fundamental and that causality is fundamental. This is a point of view with which a number of people would agree and many people would disagree.

Space.com: What is the ultimate goal of this type of theoretical work?

SmolinThe idea is to develop and invent a theory from which you can infer predictions tested by experiments. Most serious people do not take a theoretical proposal seriously unless it comes with a way to test it, at least in principle if not currently in practice. Without experience, it is so easy for a theorist to talk about beautiful mathematics, which is wrong and has nothing to do with nature. We need experimenters to pick the ideas and limit the possibilities.

It's only the last generation or two that has the situation that theories are hard to test. So you can make an entire generation work, for example, on particle physics models that go beyond the standard model and are not tested experimentally. This is unusual and unfortunately characterizes our time.

Many people who are serious in the field of fundamental theoretical physics are working very hard to understand and invent proposals that are testable now. My version of non-localization predicts that quantum effects are partly due to the fact that atoms are very similar to a very large number of atoms in the universe. If we could create a single quantum system – without complete copies in the observable universe – it would not obey quantum mechanics, it would obey some somewhat different equations that I draw. It's almost the threshold of what experimental quantum mechanics labs can now test.

This article has been edited and condensed for clarity. You can Buy "The Unfinished Revolution of Einstein" on Amazon.com.

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