Albert Einstein is undeniably one of the greatest names in physics. But Einstein, for all his contributions to the physics of spacetime, was a human being confined to his own time in history. While that makes his predictions all the more impressive, it also means that, at other times, Einstein was either slightly off the mark or—dare I say it—wrong.
That said, I’d be remiss not to provide more context, lest I subscribe to certain, popular accounts of how Einstein hated such-and-such in physics. He didn’t, really, and I don’t intend to argue anything of the sort. In fact, a closer look at Einstein’s “errors” reveals the physicist’s perceptive yet prudent way of thinking about our universe.
1. Gravitational waves are too weak to be detected
When Einstein published his monumental papers on the general theory of relativity in 1916, he predicted that powerful ripples in spacetime would manifest as wave-like energy forms that propagate across the universe. In 2015, the LIGO Collaboration confirmed that gravitational waves were real; Einstein was right.
By 1936, many had accepted Einstein’s predictions—except for, apparently, the man himself. After reviewing his calculations, Einstein, with collaborator Nathan Rosen, concluded that the math was incomplete. In a letter to fellow physicist Max Born, he wrote, “I arrived at the interesting result that gravitational waves do not exist, though they had been assumed a certainty to the first approximation.”
After a famous scuffle with the journal Physical Review, as well as other physicists pointing out errors in his 1936 paper, Einstein again revised his views and took a more measured, tentative approach. Gravitational waves may exist, but they should be too weak to detect. He was wrong.
2. Quantum entanglement cannot be real
Einstein’s supposed disdain for quantum mechanics overshadows his essential contributions to modern quantum mechanics. To be clear, Einstein accepted quantum mechanical phenomena but was convinced that the theory describing them was incomplete.
One example is quantum entanglement, an odd state in which two separated particles are linked such that measuring the state of one allows the prediction of the other’s state. Einstein’s qualms were that “elements of the physical reality” must be confirmed by “experiments and measurements” that can be translated into physical theory.
Unless these particles were communicating faster than the speed of light, we must be missing some hidden, more realistic variable connecting the two. These arguments were introduced in a famous 1935 paper co-written by Einstein, Rosen, and Boris Podolsky, and came to be known as the EPR Paradox.
... continue reading