What a year! This is the fifth conference this year.
Slides of the talk "Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Argument, Bohr's Reply and in What Sense Quantum Mechanics is Fundamentally Incomplete" on 16 October 2025, organized by the Department of Philosophy of Science of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Argument, Bohr's Reply and in What Sense Quantum Mechanics is Fundamentally Incomplete
Vesselin Petkov
Minkowski Institute
Montreal, Canada
https://www.minkowskiinstitute.com
https://vesselinpetkov.com
vpetkov@minkowskiinstitute.com
October 15 -16, 2025
Hall 2, Rectorate of Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski”
15 Tzar Osvoboditel Blvd.
1504 Sofia
Bulgaria
Abstract
In their 1935 paper Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen put forward an argument intended to demonstrate that quantum mechanics is incomplete since it does not assign simultaneous values for physical properties (represented by non-commuting operators) associated with a quantum object such as position and momentum, for example. Although the argument contained a thought experiment which led to the discovery of quantum entanglement - perhaps the most counter-intuitive and profound feature of quantum phenomena - ultimately, it failed to achieve its goal - to demonstrate that quantum mechanics is incomplete in the sense Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen argued. Bohr disagreed with the stated goal of the argument, but his reply was based mostly on his complementarity principle and essentially re-stated the postulate of the impossibility to measure simultaneously two physical properties of a quantum object (represented by non-commuting operators) without providing any explanation of that impossibility. However, in addition to discovering the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument contributed to the realization that quantum mechanics is indeed fundamentally incomplete, because it does not tell us what the quantum object itself is (since it deals only with its states) and does not explain how a measurement of a physical quantity of a particle instantaneously (in the particle's reference frame) determines the corresponding physical quantity of a distant second particle (the two particles being described by a common wave function). An atomistic spacetime model of the quantum object, in the spirit of quantum physics, is considered in order to address the most challenging issue involved in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument - the physical meaning of the instantaneous correlation (not causation) between two space-like separated events, representing measurements on two quantum objects described by a common wave function.
