This is a reprinting of Margenau’s response to EPR (and to some extent, his evaluation of previous responses to EPR by Bohr, Kemble and Ruark). Margenau’s contribution to the EPR debate is certainly one of the most original, no doubt at least in part due to the meaty correspondence he had with Einstein while producing it. Margenau’s main strategy in this paper is to argue against the standard collapse postulate of quantum mechanics, suggesting that the EPR argument only applies to quantum mechanics with this postulate added. He also argues against the statistical interpretation of the collapse postulate suggested by Kemble and others.

This chapter provides a complete list and brief analyses of published and unpublished responses to EPR in 1935 (virtually all of which are reprinted as later chapters in this book). We invite a renewed consideration of certain contributors not much discussed elsewhere in the literature. These include going beyond Kemble’s short criticism of EPR to his ensuing disagreement with Margenau about the viability of an ensemble interpretation of the wavefunction, and also a response to Kemble’s note on EPR by Podolsky himself. We also examine the correspondence between Margenau and Einstein in the wake of EPR, discussing the role of the collapse postulate, and finally we discuss two papers by Furry, which although not entirely satisfactory qua a response to EPR’s arguments, are nevertheless of great potential interest for the foundations literature more generally.

This is a transcription of a typescript Kemble had appended to a letter to Margenau in 1935. In this paragraph, Kemble admits that his initial published response to EPR missed the point of their argument.