Einstein wasn’t talking about anything at all, since it’s a misattribution. Einstein never said that. Someone just stuck Einstein’s name in front of their own stupid garbage quote to make it sound smarter.
It’s terrible, wrong, and out of context. Einstein was talking about quantum mechanics not mental health. He really didn’t like that at the quantum level results are random but follow a very spefic probability curve.
He though quantum mechanics would be able to achive classical physics like results. Where the only uncertainty was because of measurement error.
quantum uncertainty is the most experimentaly proven theory in physics. So even in the context Einstein made the statement he was wrong.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
GeneralVincent@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
“Einstein wasn’t talking about anything at all, since it’s a misattribution. Einstein never said that. Someone just stuck Einstein’s name in front of their own stupid garbage quote to make it sound smarter.” - Einstein, 2025
squaresinger@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
“That’s exactly how to do that!” - Gandalf
bunchberry@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Putting aside the fact that you cannot “experimentally prove” anything as proof is for mathematics, claiming you can experimentally demonstrate fundamental uncertainty is, to put it blindly, incoherent. Uncertainty is a negative, it is a statement that there is no underlying cause for something. You cannot empirically demonstrate the absence of an unknown cause.
If you believe in fundamental uncertainty, it would be appropriate to argue in favor of this using something like the principle of parsimony, pointing out the fact that we have no evidence for an underlying cause so we shouldn’t believe in one. Claiming that you have “proven” there is no underlying cause is backwards logic.
Einstein, of course, was fully aware of such arguments and acknowledged such a possibility, but he put forwards his own arguments as to why it leads to logical absurdities to treat the randomness of quantum mechanics as fundamental; it’s not merely a problem of randomness, but he showed with a thought experiment involving atomic decay that it forces you to have to reject the very existence of an perspective-independent reality.
There is no academic consensus on how to address Einstein’s arguments, and so to claim he’s been “proven wrong” is quite a wild claim to make.
“[W]hat is proved by impossibility proofs is lack of imagination.” (John Bell)