Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

by Anil Ananthaswamy

Einstein, of course, was increasingly being thought of as a curmudgeonly old man who was holding on to his precious ideas of realism, locality, and at times even determinism. Though, to be fair to Einstein, the lack of determinism did not overly bother him. The overused quote of his in popular culture, that “God does not play dice with the world,” misrepresents his stand on the issue. He certainly did, during the early 1920s, express concerns about the indeterminate nature of the quantum world, saying that he found the idea “intolerable,” and if it were true, he “would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee of a gaming house, than a physicist.” But as quantum mechanics matured, Einstein backed off from his disavowal of indeterminism. It was an aspect of reality he was willing to accept.