Physicist — Boris Yakovlevich Podolsky (1896–1966) was a Russian-born theoretical physicist naturalised American, who emigrated to the United States as a young man and worked at various American universities, including the California Institute of Technology and the University of Cincinnati. His name is inseparably linked to the 1935 paper written with Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, from which the famous “EPR paradox” takes its name. In that work the three authors argued that quantum mechanics, with its correlations between distant particles, could not be a complete description of physical reality. The debate they launched on entanglement and “locality” became one of the central themes in the foundations of quantum physics and, decades later, led to Bell’s theorems and to experiments on entanglement.
Fun fact
It was Podolsky who actually wrote the EPR paper and communicated its content to the New York Times, which ran the headline “Einstein Attacks Quantum Theory”: Einstein, annoyed by the leak to the press and by how the text had been written, was irritated by the episode.
Theories and contributions
- EPR paradox — Argument by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (1935) that quantum mechanics would be an incomplete description of reality, owing to correlations between distant particles.
- Quantum entanglement — The EPR debate brings into focus the non-local correlations between particles, today a cornerstone of quantum information.
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Linked atoms
1 linked atoms.