Einstein’s boxes

At the 1927 Solvay conference, Einstein presented a thought experimentintended to demonstrate the incompleteness of the quantum mechanicaldescription of reality. In the following years, the thought experiment waspicked up and modified by Einstein, de Broglie, and several other commentatorsinto a simple scenario involving the splitting in half of the wave function ofa single particle in a box. In this paper we collect together severalformulations of this thought experiment from the existing literature; analyzeand assess it from the point of view of the Einstein-Bohr debates, the EPRdilemma, and Bell's theorem; and generally lobby for Einstein's Boxes takingits rightful place alongside similar but historically better-known quantummechanical thought experiments such as EPR and Schroedinger's Cat.Comment: Published versio