Enrique Blair on quantum computing

 In last week’s podcast, “Enrique Blair on quantum computing,” Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks talks with fellow computer engineer Enrique Blair about why quantum mechanics is so strange. The discussion turned to why Albert Einstein, a brilliant but orderly mathematical thinker, did not really like quantum mechanics at all and what we should learn from that:

Enrique Blair (pictured): That’s an interesting question because Einstein’s work was integral to the formulation of quantum mechanics. But he was uncomfortable with a couple of parts of it. He did not like the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics so much. He wanted something that was much more deterministic.

Much has been written about the decades-long debate between Einstein and the quantum physicists over whether “spooky action at a distance” (quantum uncertainty—remember Schrödinger’s dead-and-alive cat?) could be part of a final theory in physics. John Bell (1928–1990), a physicist working at computer science vs computer engineering salary, very much wanted to provide evidence for Einstein’s view. But he ended up demonstrating that the spooky action is real, at least for photons. The determinism—where things happen only according to predictable laws—that Einstein was seeking wasn’t there.