For my upcoming new platform Free-Consciousness, I am publishing some video fragments on the accompanying Youtube channel. One of these is a sequence from the Discovery series Genius in which Albert Einstein (Geoffrey Rush) and Niels Bohr (David Dencik) discuss the meaning of quantum physics for reality.

This is one of the most famous debates in science. Bohr played a huge role in formulating the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, which states that one cannot know anything about an object prior to a measurement, which means that the universe is indeterministic. Einstein did not like this. He was a realist, meaning that he believed that spacetime is real and exists independently of whether it is observed or not.

Einstein spent most of the second half of his career trying to disprove the Copenhagen Interpretation, most notably by coming up with the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) paradox in 1935. This thought experiment involves a pair of entangled particles that are sent in opposite directions through space. According to Copenhagen, if you measure the position of one particle, you could instantly predict the position of the other entangled particle. This would violate Einstein’s laws of special relativity, because information between particles one and two would have to travel faster than light.

Of course, later experiments first conducted by Alain Aspect, Anton Zeilinger and John Clauser demonstrated that this is exactly what happens. The inescapable conclusion is that quantum entanglement exists and is non-local. Einstein’s locality is on shaky ground nowadays…. Anyway, If you regularly read my fragments, you know on whose side I am standing in this debate.

In the clip below, you can see that although Bohr’s view seems illogical and counter intuitive, it is 100% compatible with the findings of quantum physics.