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"The theory produces a lot but does not bring us closer to the secret of the old," wrote Albert Einstein in December 1926. "I am convinced that He did not play dice "
Einstein was responding to a letter from the German physicist Max Born According to Born, the heart of the new quantum mechanics theory is beating randomly and uncertainly, as if it was suffering from arrhythmia. that physics before the quantum had always been about to make that and obtain that the new quantum mechanics seemed to say that when we do this [19459005weobtain] only with a certain probability, and in certain circumstances we could have the other .
Einstein had none, and his insistence that God does not play dice with the resonant universe born over decades, as familiar and as elusive in the sense of E = mc 2 . What did Einstein mean by that? And how did Einstein conceive of God?
Hermann and Pauline Einstein were non-observant Ashkenazi Jews. In spite of the secularity of his parents, Albert, aged nine, discovered and embraced Judaism with considerable pbadion. For a time he was a conscientious and attentive Jew. According to Jewish custom, his parents invited a poor scholar to share a meal with them each week, and Max Talmud (later Talmey), an impoverished medical student, explained math and science with the young and impressionable Einstein. He consumed all 21 volumes of the popular books on the natural sciences of Aaron Bernstein (1880) [18809].
Talmud then directed him to that of Emmanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason (1781). , from which he migrated to the philosophy of David Hume. Since Hume, it was a relatively short step for the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, whose extremely empirical philosophical philosophy required a complete rejection of metaphysics, including notions of absolute space and time and the existence of atoms. [19659002] But this intellectual journey had ruthlessly exposed the conflict between science and writing. Einstein, now 12 years old, has rebelled. He developed a deep aversion to the dogma of organized religion that lasted all his life, an aversion that extended to all forms of authoritarianism, including any kind of dogmatic atheism.
This young and heavy regime of empiricist philosophy would serve Einstein well. some 14 years later. Mach's rejection of absolute space and time has helped to shape Einstein's theory of special relativity (including the iconic E = mc 2 ), which he formulated in 1905 while he was working as a "Third Clbad Technical Expert" at the Swiss Patent Office in Berne. Ten years later, Einstein would complete the transformation of our understanding of space and time with the formulation of his general theory of relativity, in which the force of gravity is replaced by a curved space-time. But as he grew older (and wiser), he came to reject Mach's aggressive empiricism and once said that "Mach was as good at mechanics as it was evil at philosophy."
O Einstein evolved into a much more realistic position. He preferred to accept the content of a scientific theory realistically, as a "true" representation contingently of an objective physical reality. And although he did not want any part of religion, the conviction in God that he had taken away from his brief flirtation with Judaism became the foundation on which he founded his philosophy. Asked about the basis of his realistic position, he explained: "I do not have a better expression than the term" religious "for this confidence in the rationality of reality and in its accessibility, at least to a certain extent. measure, to human reason. & # 39;
But Einstein was a god of philosophy, not religion. When asked many years later when he believed in God, he replied, "I believe in the God of Spinoza, who reveals himself to the legal harmony of all that exists, but not to a God who cares about the fate and acts of humanity. "Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, had conceived of God as identical to nature. For this he was considered a dangerous heretic and was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam.
Einstein's God is infinitely superior, but impersonal and intangible, subtle but not wicked. He is also firmly determinist. As far as Einstein is concerned, God's "legal harmony" is established throughout the cosmos by strict adherence to the physical principles of cause and effect. Thus, Einstein's philosophy leaves no room for free will: "Everything is determined, beginning and end, by forces over which we have no control. We all dance on a mysterious air, sung far away by an invisible. player. & # 39;
Special and general theories of relativity have provided a radical new way to conceive of space and time and their active interactions with matter and energy. These theories are entirely compatible with the "legal harmony" established by Einstein's God. But the new theory of quantum mechanics, which Einstein had also helped found in 1905, told a different story. Quantum mechanics concerns the interactions between matter and radiation, on the scale of atoms and molecules, in a context of space and pbadive time.
Earlier in 1926, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger had radically transformed the theory by formulating in terms of rather obscure "wave functions". Schrödinger himself preferred to interpret them in a realistic way, by describing the "material waves". However, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and the German physicist Werner Heisenberg strongly advocated not to take the new quantum representation literally.
Essentially, Bohr and Heisenberg argued that science had finally caught up. with the conceptual problems involved in describing the reality that philosophers had warned for centuries. Bohr was quoted as saying, "There is no quantum world, there is only an abstract quantum physics description." It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to determine the nature of nature. Physics concerns what we can say about nature. "
This vaguely positivist statement was echoed by Heisenberg:" [W] we must remember that what we observe Is not the nature in itself, but the nature exposed to our nature.quest method. "Their interpretation of Copenhagen, which is broadly antealistic – denying that the wave function represents the only one of its kind. actual physical state of a quantum system – has quickly become the dominant thinking of quantum mechanics.Further recent variations of such antirealistic interpretations suggest that wave function is simply a means of "coding" our experience, or our cro subjective insights derived from our experience of physics, allowing us to use what we have learned in the past to predict the future. .
But that was totally inconsistent with Einstein's philosophy. Einstein could not accept an interpretation in which the main object of the representation – the wave function – is not "real". He could not accept that his God would allow the legal harmony to break down as completely at the atomic scale, resulting in lawless indeterminism and uncertainty, with effects that can not be predicted fully and unambiguously. from their causes.
This is how one of the most remarkable debates in the history of science was given by Bohr and Einstein on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. It was a shock of two philosophies, two contradictory sets of metaphysical preconceptions about the nature of reality and what we might expect from a scientific representation of it. The debate began in 1927 and, although the protagonists are no longer with us, the debate is still very much alive.
And not solved.
I do not think Einstein would have been particularly surprised by this. In February 1954, just 14 months before his death, he wrote in a letter to American physicist David Bohm: "If God created the world, his first concern certainly was not to facilitate our understanding." 
This article was originally published in Aeon and has been reissued under a Creative Commons license.
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