His large output, however, created opportunities for misquotations and false attributions. Posters and bumper stickers bear slogans which never came from Einstein’s pen — or mouth.
For this reason, it is important to verify any phrase ascribed to Einstein.
One of his famous sayings asserted that “God does not play dice with the universe.” This was Einstein’s assessment of quantum mechanics. He argued for a more robust sense of causation, lawlike regularity, and mathematical certainty instead of mere probabilities.
But what exactly did he write?
In a letter dated 4 December 1926, sent to Max Born, Einstein wrote:
Die Quantenmechanik ist sehr Achtung gebietend. Aber eine innere Stimme sagt mir, dass das noch nicht der wahre Jakob ist. Die Theorie liefert viel, aber dem Geheimnis des Alten bringt sie uns kaum näher. Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, dass der nicht würfelt.
Although this is a well-attested text, the phrase kaum näher is often cited as nicht näher. The lexical difference is not significant, and the straightforward meaning of the quote doesn’t change.
Sometimes the text is quoted with an individual word italicized for emphasis.
Only by examining the letter itself could one contend for or against italicizing any particular word in the text. Was the original letter handwritten or typed? Does it still exist in some library or archive?
Some historians assert that the same or similar phrasing may have been used in a letter to Niels Bohr. Again, archival research would be required to confirm or deny such statements.
Einstein wrote a letter dated 21 March 1942 to Cornelius Lanczos. Einstein wrote:
Es scheint hart, dem Herrgott in die Karten zu gucken. Aber dass er würfelt und sich telepathischer Mittel bedient (wie es ihm von der gegenwärtigen Quantentheorie zugemutet wird), kann ich keinen Augenblick glauben.
Commenting on this letter, Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann write that Einstein was “expressing his dissatisfaction with quantum theory, with its denial of determinism and its limitation to probabilistic, statistical predictions.”
Dukas and Hoffmann offer translations of parts of the letter; in one, Einstein’s view of physics is rendered as “the comprehension of reality through something basically simple and unified.”
Although the transmissions of these texts is a bit wobbly, there is certainly enough evidence to justify assertions that Einstein sought, and asserted the existence of, lawlike regularities and causations in physics. He was not content with only the statistical phenomena, but rather wanted the concrete noumena which lay beneath those generalizations.
Einstein didn’t disagree with statistical methods, like those, e.g., of Boltzmann. But he seems to have viewed them as merely characterizations of observations, as phenomenal, and not an explanation or a mathematical modeling of the underlying noumena.
