Daily Junction Play
649watching now
The Royal Institution 16 Jun 2026 25 here now

Jim Al Khalili explains Einstein's battle with quantum mechanics

This is a clip from a longer talk where physicist Jim Al-Khalili takes you through 100 years of quantum revolution, from Heisenberg's 1925 breakthrough to the technologies reshaping our world right no

For You

Because of what you watch

Comments (20)

Daily Junction discussion mixed with clearly attributed comments from the original video provider.

Join in — free. Comments on Daily Junction are for members, so real names stay rare and bots stay out.

One field. We email you a 6-digit code — no password needed. Your comment is kept while you do it.

Under 13? You’ll need a parent’s OK first — it takes them one click.

@
Its all our consciousness..
Mother nature and atoms laugh at our inability to create a unified theory of everything.
@
Einstein is essentially, along with Max Planck, the father of quantum physics. He didn't think it was wrong, he thought it was incomplete. The entire attitude of "shut up and calculate" was saying, "ignore these very foundational problems and just push forward."
Maybe, after 120 years of failure, someone should listen to Einstein's and work on the hard problems. I know it doesn't get your name published in a journal quarterly, but if you figured something out, you get remembered for all eternity. And we know a lot more than we did in 1920, and we have cool tools to help us like AI and supercomputers.
@
Maldacena 2013 super symmetry 137.036=g*m^2/k*e^2=GR/QM=(m*g*g(p)*pm*g*m)*(1/137.036)/((e-)*g*(e+))=ER/EPR produce Rydberg constant R=(me*e^2/(8*p^2*h^3*c)*(2pi*A*c^2/2pi*A*c^2)=((2pi*A*me*c^2/137.036)/ch)*(137.036*pi/A)*(k*e^2/ch)^2=(137.036*pi/A)*1/2pi*137.06)^2=1/(4pi*A*137.036)=1097373*10^7/meter=1/L in vacuum ch=8pi*g*(m*c^2/2)^2/c^2=2pi*g*m^2=2pi*l*m*c^2[type1]=2pi*g(p)*pm^2[SO(32)]=2pi*pl*pm*c^2/(4pi/3)[type2b]=2pi*k*e^2*137.036[QG]=2pi*A*me*c^2/137.036[type2a]=2pi*g*(137.036*up*e-/l)*(137.036*up*e+/l)[Feynman diagram of Maxwell equation at Planck scale l=g*m^2/m*c^2=1.616231*10^-35 meter as 5th dimension of Kaluza Klein EM theory in GR] =8pi*(137.036*A)^2*(pm*c^2)*(128.4980143/128.51991)[E8*E8]=(2*A1*137.036*pm*c^2)*(4pi*A*137.036)=En*L produce photon of EM wave at speed of light c=1/(up)^0.5=299792458[meter/second][u=4pi/10^7, p=8.85418782/10^12] r=En=ch/L=chR=me*(c/137.036)^2/2=13.6*e show on fine structure split line of hydrogen Atom[A=5.29177282*10^-11 meter=A1*(128.51991/128.4980143)] spectrum have 2*13.6*e=me*(c/137.036)^2 between electron e-=me*(c/137.036)^2*A=k*e^2, positron e+ =ch/(2pi*137.036)k*e^2 of Dirac QF as spin down electron[EPR] double electron energy shel
@
QM classicalised in 2009. SR wrong due to reference frame mixing and bad math. GR follows as incorrect. The CAUSE of gravity was published in 2002. Wakey wakey from your "dogmatic slumber" party. Hilarious wannabe relevant 'physics' commentator.
@
Why does he wave his hands around so much when speaking? FFS.
@
Who cares about one or two photons' positions or wavelengths? In our world, there are gazillions of photons at every position and wavelength. We can't measure them all.
@
for the love of buddha . please just use my E8/CFT that unifies GR and QM.
@
Perhaps one day we will realise our greatest blunder doubting Einstein, or perhaps Einstein end up with a bigger blunder than his λ in GR...
@
Not too bad... Doesn't horribly mangle the EPR argument - as so many have ( arXiv:1809.01751 ) - but it is marred by that gratuitous resurrection of the "wave-particle complementarity" archaism; an idea that had already been recognised as a naively psi-ontological mistake by the time of EPR. To paraphrase Werner, there's no place for the werewave superstition in modern discussions of QM. It does also fail to mention that Einstein actually was unhappy with the EPR argument, if not the "incompleteness sentiment", and formulated his own argument for the supposed incompleteness of QM that doesn't rely on the dodgy EPR reality criterion.
@
If it's from the Royal Institution, I'll even watch clip shows. ;-) The full talk is also worth a watch or three.
@
Gott würfelt bei jeder sich ergebenden Gelegenheit.
@
The Einstein battle against himself
@
Most of quantum physics describes a world that seems like woo-woo nonsense except it's a phenomenonal predictor of what actually happens.
@
I can't understand why you would make it so difficult when you can explain everything simply stepping back and putting "something" into void. That void that you all call "spacetime continuum" . If it is continuum it is not void
@
Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen walked in to a bar. Which Bar ? !
@
When I was studying at Cambridge back in 2007, I had the great fortune to ask Steven Hawking about the EPR paradox. His simple answer was that Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen were, "confused." Diplomatic, yet to the point.
@
Orthodoxy! It is interesting that Sabine describes this paper is not about entanglement.
@
8:05 🧐
@
The EPR paradox is one of those ideas that still feels slightly uncanny even after decades of progress in physics—and it all begins with Albert Einstein, along with Podolsky and Rosen in 1935.

They were trying to challenge what quantum mechanics was claiming at the time. Their argument (now known as the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox) was essentially this: if quantum mechanics is complete, then two particles can become so deeply linked that measuring one instantly affects the state of the other—even if they are separated by vast distances. Einstein famously disliked this implication and called it “spooky action at a distance,” because it seemed to violate the idea that nothing should influence something faster than light.

What makes the EPR paradox so powerful is that Einstein wasn’t saying quantum mechanics was wrong in its predictions—he was questioning whether it was complete. He believed there might be “hidden variables” underneath the randomness, restoring a more classical sense of reality where things have definite properties whether or not we measure them.

Fast-forward a few decades, and experiments—especially those testing Bell’s inequalities—showed that nature does not
@
I think I got the paradoxes worked out