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Einstein 1949

Individual Completion

History · primary record · not a Zenodo deposit

From Planck to the demand

The cavity before h, Planck’s entropy bridge, Einstein through 1917, then the camps. Gleason, Bell’s papers, and the inequalities are mapped after Bohm. Hidden-variable schemes are separated from the 1949 demand. Einstein’s own papers sit in their years: the statistical work of 1901–1904, the photoelectric law, Brownian motion, special relativity, the field equation, the quantum he kept, and the nonsymmetric unified field. The records are on the Papers tab. The loopholes and the tests run to the loophole-free runs and the 2022 prize. Feynman’s path integral is before the 1949 Reply. Hossenfelder and Donadi’s superdeterministic toy is with the hidden-variable schemes. Citation credits, numbered in order of first appearance, are the last chapter.

How to read this

The question, and the camps

Three camps are not three versions of one theory. They disagree about what a state is.

The question through this record is Einstein’s 1949 demand. A complete description of an individual situation would have laws that, per se, have nothing to do with statistics. Statistical quantum theory would stand to it as statistical mechanics stands to mechanics. At each stage the question is whether that demand was met, refuted, or postponed. The two Zenodo papers remain the program. This tab is the literature they sit in. The harmonic notes are unchanged and come last.

Do not merge the camps

By 1927 there are three positions, and they are not cosmetic. The Göttingen–Copenhagen calculational camp, which itself splits, says the new mechanics is the theory: Heisenberg, Born, and Jordan build it as matrices of measurable amplitudes; Bohr supplies complementarity and the role of the classical apparatus; Pauli is its sharpest critic of pictures. The wave camp, de Broglie and then Schrödinger, tries to keep a continuous object in space. Einstein is not a member of that camp. He allies with Schrödinger against the claim that the statistical theory is complete, and he refuses Schrödinger’s reading of the wave in configuration space as the individual. de Broglie’s pilot wave is a third realist proposal. Bohm revives it in 1952. Einstein does not accept the revival, because the guidance is nonlocal. Later interpretations are listed in their own chapter. They are not extra camps of 1926.

What each person contributes, below, is the piece of mathematics or the experimental constraint that stayed. A camp affiliation is not that contribution. Born belongs to the matrix paper and also writes the probability rule Schrödinger rejected. Dirac belongs to neither philosophical camp and shows the two calculi are one. Jordan is a founder of the matrix theory, not a spokesman for Bohr.

Primary orientation. Solvay 1927 proceedings, published 1928, are the record of the split. Bohr’s Como lecture of September 1927 is the complementarity statement. Einstein’s “Physics and Reality,” Journal of the Franklin Institute 221 (1936) 349, and the 1949 Reply in Schilpp, are his later statements. Schrödinger’s 1935 papers are the entanglement and cat texts, not a vote for Copenhagen.