Conceptions of Reality — Einstein and Bohr (2)

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Continued from Conceptions of Reality — Einstein and Bohr (1).

A fascinating video. Viewing it leaves me with a sense just how old fashioned Einstein was — an iconoclast in his way, highly perturbed by iconoclasm in other fields, in fact, in fields that he had brought into being. The revolutionary did not like his children. 

God does not dice, said Einstein, meaning that phenomena that do not conform with his system of causality were senselessly random and therefore militated against God's orderly and harmonious Universe.

Bohr riposted: Einstein, stop telling God what he should be like.

Einstein believed in what is effectively a disjointed but supposedly neatly uniform Universe, sustained by local causality. 

By contrast, Bohr accepted that the universe is a whole in which everything could be instantly related to everything else — effects were not constrained, slowed or localised by restrictions such as the speed of light.

The controvery was kicked off by Bohr's claim that it was not possible to measure the properties of an atomic particle, notably its speed, without disturbing it. For the measiring devices, for instance clocks, are affected by gravity.

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Two aspects stand out from the point of view of my own philosophical development: man is a creature of the meso-cosmos, which explains Einstein's startling parochialism. Man is adjusted to the medium-sized dimensions of reality, essentially the world experienced by us in everyday life. But reality takes place in many other dimensions, to some of which we shall presumably never find access — though it does leave traces observable to the human mind —, while others pose tremendous challenges to our imagination and rationalising faculties.

The second aspect is touched by Bell's remark, in which he acknowledges that the evidence supports Bohr rather than Einstein, i. e. things as conceived by Quantum Mechanics do appear to be real: things can happen all at the same time unconstrained by Einstein's conventional causality. 

However, in an important sense, this does not matter, that is: it is of no import to the creatures of the meso-cosmos, as we are (as yet) unable to take practical advantage of the goings-on outside of our causal cage — for instance teleportation.

We are like a tiger behind a thick glas wall in a Zoo wondering why that tiny little girl that keeps provoking him remains impervious to his attacks.

Continued here.