From Eric Van
It seems grossly premature to declare a victory for Niels Bohr in his great debate with Einstein over the meaning of quantum mechanics (26 February, p 36).
Yes, the violation of Bell’s inequality in experiments by Alain Aspect and others appears increasingly likely to rule out “local realism”, Einstein’s favoured interpretation. But many physicists – going back to John Bell himself – would put their money on the eventual acceptance of a non-local hidden-variable theory such as David Bohm’s. And if that proves to be the case, then Einstein was correct about realism, correct about determinism (versus inherent randomness), but wrong about locality – while Bohr was wrong on all three counts.
Watertown, Massachusetts, US
