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.
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.
