Chinese physicists prove Einstein wrong and put century-old debate to an end

For the first time, scientists in China have faithfully recreated a thought experiment proposed by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago, showing that the quantum world behaves in ways the iconic physicist never fully accepted.

Pan Jianwei – known as the country’s “father of quantum” – and his team at the University of Science and Technology of China built a device sensitive enough to register the tiny push of a single photon.

Einstein laid out a modified version of the famous double-slit experiment at the historic 1927 Solvay Conference in Brussels, hoping it would disprove Bohr’s view that a particle’s path and its wavelike interference pattern could not be observed at the same time.

Bohr believed this was not a technical limitation but a fundamental rule of nature. Einstein disagreed.

The 1927 Solvay Conference in Brussels was the most iconic meeting in the history of quantum physics, when Albert Einstein (front row, centre) and Niels Bohr (middle row, right) disagreed on the fundamental nature of the emerging field. Photo: Handout

In a paper published on Wednesday in Physical Review Letters, the researchers confirmed Bohr’s thinking that both properties cannot be observed at once – a principle that defines the limits of human knowledge.

South China Morning Post