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This is a reprinting of Bohr’s note to Nature advertising his forthcoming response to the EPR paper. It is very brief but contains in essence the argumentative tack Bohr would in fact employ in his full response to EPR.
This is a reprinting of Furry’s response to EPR. Although his response misses the mark, his discussion of an example is intriguing for other aspects of the foundations of quantum mechanics.
This chapter provides a complete list and brief analyses of published and unpublished responses to EPR in 1935 (virtually all of which are reprinted as later chapters in this book). We invite a renewed consideration of certain contributors not much discussed elsewhere in the literature. These include going beyond Kemble’s short criticism of EPR to his ensuing disagreement with Margenau about the viability of an ensemble interpretation of the wavefunction, and also a response to Kemble’s note on EPR by Podolsky himself. We also examine the correspondence between Margenau and Einstein in the wake of EPR, discussing the role of the collapse postulate, and finally we discuss two papers by Furry, which although not entirely satisfactory qua a response to EPR’s arguments, are nevertheless of great potential interest for the foundations literature more generally.
This is a translation of the excerpts published in Naturwissenschaften of Grete Hermann’s 1935 essay on philosophy of quantum mechanics, recently translated into English. Her main thesis, in line with her natural-philosophical training and neo-Kantian commitments, is to argue that quantum mechanics does not refute the principle of causality. Quantum mechanics cannot be completed by, hidden variables, because it is already causally complete (albeit retroductively). In establishing this provocative thesis, she makes important use of Bohr’s principles of correspondence and complementarity and of Weizsäcker's version of the gamma-ray microscope, arguing that the lesson of quantum mechanics is the impossibility of an absolute description of nature independent of the context of observation.
This is a revision of John Trimmer’s English translation of Schrödinger’s famous ‘cat paper’, originally published in three parts in Naturwissenschaften in 1935.
This is a reprinting of Wolfe’s response to the EPR paper. Wolfe insists upon an epistemic reading of the wavefunction, arguing that, under such an interpretation, the EPR paradox dissolves.
This is a reprinting of the famous May 1935 paper in Physical Review by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen. In this paper, the authors argued that the wavefunction fails to provide a complete description of reality unleashing the debate analysed in this volume.
This chapter details not only the prehistory of EPR but also examines the structure and logic of the EPR paper – including Einstein’s own preferred version of the argument for incompleteness. We here attempt a seamless interweaving of the excellent extant literature with additional details that have emerged from our work and the recent work of others. Some examples of new aspects in this prehistory of EPR include evidence of a ‘proto’ photon-box thought experiment Einstein had developed in connection with his ill-starred collaboration with Emil Rupp in 1926. We also describe the potential importance to this prehistory of Einstein’s paper with Tolman and Podolsky and of Einstein’s seminar and discussions with Schrödinger in Berlin in the early 1930s.
This is a reprinting of Edwin Kemble’s 1935 reply to the EPR paper. Kemble misses EPR’s point by taking their completeness criterion to be merely an epistemic concept; Kemble himself admits as much in a letter to Einstein later that year. His original response to EPR is nevertheless of interest, as Kemble there provides an argument for a statistical interpretation of the wavefunction – a view he attributes to Slater already in a 1929 paper, but for which Kemble provides greater clarity and motivation.
This is a reprinting of Furry’s response to Schrödinger’s cat paper and entanglement papers, as well as Furry’s response to other responses to the EPR paper, especially Bohr’s.
This is a reprinting of Einstein, Podolsky and Tolman’s 1931 letter to the editor of Physical Review. In this letter, the authors demonstrate that the principles of quantum mechanics give rise to an uncertainty in the description of past events which is analogous to the uncertainty quantum mechanics assigns to the prediction of future events.
This is a reprinting of Schrödinger’s famous pair of papers delivered at the Cambridge Philosophical Society in late 1935 and 1936, wherein he first coins the term ‘entanglement’ to describe interacting quantum systems. The first paper (1935) is given here in full; section 4 of the second paper (1936) is reprinted as an appendix.
This is the first ever printing of a short unpublished note by Schrödinger discussing canonical conjugates, which he included among his correspondence in the folder he labelled ‘The Einstein Paradox’. The note references Flint’s response to EPR and contains ideas appearing also in a letter to Einstein in July 1935.