Einstein's smart

I just read the original Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper, source of their eponymous paradox. (Check it out--it's only four pages, and probably nearly two of them are mostly skipable math.) It's a really interesting read. It is absolutely precisely reasoned (obviously--it's Einstein), and the conclusions are inescapable. What's remarkable is that they choose exactly the wrong conclusion.

It's interesting to note that Special Relativity was lying around waiting to be discovered for about 30 years before Einstein noticed it. It was (in retrospect) completely obvious from Maxwell's equations and the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and several people, such as Lorentz and Poincaire, were within a gasp of discovering it. But no one did discover it. Because what the equations implied was the contradiction of an assumption so basic that no one could conceive of discarding it; no one even realized it was an assumption. It was apparent from theory and from observation that light moved at the same speed for all observers. And it's plainly obvious that v=d/t. But no one came out and said that if velocity remains constant, distance and time must be changing. I mean, that's third-grader math. Sure, the details are more complicated than that, but if all observers measure the same speed for light, their perception of time must be different. But it took an Einstein to say it, because adjusting that postulate seems ridiculous.

And 30 years later, he* makes the exact same mistake in the first line of the EPR paper--hell, you can't even call it a mistake; he goes through inescapable steps of logic and comes to an unavoidable conclusion. He admits that it's absolutely clear from theory and experiment what the implications of Quantum Mechanics are. And he realizes that either QM is mistaken, or our basic concept of what "reality" is is wrong. And he concludes reducto ad absurdum that it must be QM that is wrong, because the assumption that reality is "wrong" was beyond his comprehension; it's ridiculous. For SR it was the absolute nature of space and time; for QM, it's the concreteness (or the "singleness") of reality. However, it is now absolutely clear from theory and experiment that our intuition about reality is wrong: there are no hidden variables; the located particle has every momentum; the electron travels through both slits.

This is not a criticism of Einstein, of course (I mean, who looks at a result and says, "That's right, and existence is wrong"? Even now, I think pretty much no one has a fundamental grasp of what's really going on, and just what the theory implies; hell, I probably made half a dozen fundamental errors in the last paragraph). This is just an observation about humanity: I notice a similar thing whenever I'm debating a Creationist, or a conservative, or pretty much having any argument. Most people are not deluded, irrational, or dishonest; they are more or less capable of forming logical constructions from a set of assumptions. Arguments usually (or at least often) seem to arise from constructions built out of different sets of postulates. Is freedom of each individual or protection of every individual the most important right? I think that one axiomatic difference explains about 90% of the differences between liberals and conservatives. If your postulates include the inerrancy of the Bible or that 2+2=4 or that Muhammad spoke to Gabriel in a cave, then trying to talk you out of them would be like convincing Euclid that triangles have more than 180º; postulates are by definition basic assumptions which can't be proved, and their definition is what keeps philosophers employed. And some of these postulates are so fundamental to our nature and our worldview that it's very difficult to break them; it sometimes takes an Einstein or a Darwin to do so. (I'll post about Darwin's postulate-breaking breakthrough next.)

Thanks to Eliezer Yudkowski's post on this topic, which was much more clear and eloquent than I've been able to achieve.

*I actually have no idea who did most of the work on the paper. But Einstein's going to get most of the credit because he's, well, Einstein.