(Image: Professor Barton Zwiebach lecturing on linearity and nonlinearity.)

By Joe Pickett, OCW Publication Director

What drove Einstein crazy?

It’s a simple question.

The answer is also simple—sort of.

Here’s Professor Barton Zwiebach in his video lecture segment “Photons and the loss of determinism,” just published on OCW as part of 8.04 Quantum Physics I:

. . . and now you have found a situation in which an identical set of experiments with identically prepared objects sometimes gives you different results. It’s a debacle. It’s a total disaster. What seems to have happened here? You suddenly have identical photons, and sometimes they go through [a polarizing filter], and sometimes they don’t go through. And therefore, you’ve lost predictability. It’s so simple to show that, if photons exist, you lose predictability. And that’s what drove Einstein crazy.

Professor Zwiebach explains other mind-boggling mysteries of quantum phenomena in 115 short videos on the 8.04 course site. Superposition, entanglement, Schrödinger’s equation—he covers the full range of topics. The videos are supplemented with textbook-like lecture notes, along with problem sets and exams.

Once you’ve gone through Professor Zwiebach’s 8.04 site, you might travel along to his 8.05 Quantum Physics II, where OCW features a similarly robust set of resources, including video lectures and lecture notes.

That’s right. A full year of MIT quantum physics with the same distinguished instructor.

Einstein would be crazy about that too!