On 25 March 1935, the Physical Review received a paper from Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, with the title “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” A few days later, on 30 March 1935, I was born. My life with Einstein was off to a promising start.
Some would call it an inauspicious start. Abraham Pais, for example, says in his otherwise admirable biography of Einstein 1 that “the only part of this article that will ultimately survive, I believe, is this last phrase [No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this], which so poignantly summarizes Einstein’s views on quantum mechanics in his later years.” But today, in this centenary of the Einstein annus mirabilis, as the EPR paper and I both turn 70, it is, in fact, the most cited of all Einstein’s papers. 2 The debate over its...