Einstein's Boxes

Abstract

At the 1927 Solvay conference, Einstein presented a thought experiment intended to demonstrate the incompleteness of the quantum mechanical description of reality. In the following years, the thought experiment was picked up and modified by Einstein, de Broglie, and several other commentators into a simple scenario involving the splitting in half of the wave function of a single particle in a box. In this paper we collect together several formulations of this thought experiment from the existing literature; analyze and assess it from the point of view of the Einstein-Bohr debates, the EPR dilemma, and Bell's theorem; and generally lobby for Einstein's Boxes taking its rightful place alongside similar but historically better-known quantum mechanical thought experiments such as EPR and Schroedinger's Cat.

Published version

References in corpus (2)

• Violation of Bell's inequality under strict Einstein locality conditions
• Quantum Information and Relativity Theory

Cited by in corpus (14)

• J.S. Bell's Concept of Local Causality
• The Two Bell's Theorems of John Bell
• Against `Realism'
• Local Causality and Completeness: Bell vs. Jarrett
• From Einstein's Theorem to Bell's Theorem: A History of Quantum Nonlocality
• Bell Locality and the Nonlocal Character of Nature
• Quantum discord is Bohr's notion of non-mechanical disturbance introduced in his answer to EPR
• How to account for quantum non-locality: ontic structural realism and the primitive ontology of quantum physics
• Generalization of the Born rule
• Single-particle entanglement gives rise to truly nonlocal effects like single-particle steering
• From the measurement problem to the primitive ontology programme
• Classifying Causal Structures: Ascertaining when Classical Correlations are Constrained by Inequalities
• Splitting the wavefunctions of two particles in two boxes
• On the Classification between $\psi$-Ontic and $\psi$-Epistemic Ontological Models