Stuart Samuel

The Resolution of the Einstein-Poldoskly-Rosen Paradox for the Entangled Spin 1/2 System

In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen published a paper indicating some disturbing aspects concerning quantum mechanics including the possibility of the violation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and instantaneous long-ranged effects subsequently named “spooky action at a distance” by Einstein. The EPR paradox has spurred considerable research since its publication including some attempts to eliminate the paradox by augmenting quantum mechanics with hidden variables, modifications that were later ruled out by experiments. In this talk, I will review the various arguments of the original EPR paper and then turn to the entangled spin-1/2 system, which has become the quintessential example of an EPR paradox. I conduct gedanken experiments showing that the collapse of the spin part of the wavefunction cannot take place. This result has many implications for quantum mechanics. In this talk, I discuss one of them: the resolution of the EPR paradox within the normal framework of quantum mechanics.
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Stuart Samuel is a theoretical physicist known for his work on the speed of gravity and for his work with Alan Kostelecký on spontaneous Lorentz violation in string theory, now called the Bumblebee model. He also made significant contributions in field theory and particle physics.

He was formerly a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, a professor of physics at Columbia University, a professor of physics at City College of New York and a participating scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Samuel has received a number of awards for his research including a Control Data Corporation PACER Award (with Dr. K. M. Moriarty) for outstanding computer programming, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, and the Chester–Davis Prize (from Indiana University). He was one of 90 scientists in 1984 to be honored as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Recipient.