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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epsteinbd who wrote (41090)	8/31/2002 11:32:34 AM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Er. It's true that the Einstein quote doesn't have much to do with divine issues except in some metaphorical sense. But I'd have to take issue with your gloss of Einstein there. As I understand it, he was invoking the divinity to reject quantum mechanics, which he didn't quite grok. It didn't have much to to with either God or "that there are physical laws to the universe and that these laws are not the result of coincidence or some form of gambling". It had to do with a theory Einstein didn't like, and you gloss on "physical laws" is not a particularly good representation of that theory either. Fortunately, the way science operates, a theory that works gets accepted, regardless of the greatness of particular minds that might reject it. Quantum mechanics has proven to be quite a useful theory, despite Einstein's distaste for it. Here's a bit of what a quick google search turns up: In quantum mechanics, many events look like they happen by absolutely random chance. Exactly when a radiactive decay occurs, exactly where a particular blip of light gets absorbed, etc seem not to be determined by anything in the way the universe is ahead of time. Einstein strongly suspected that these events all did have specific causes, but that the causes were somehow hidden away in some hard-to-find form. That's what he meant when he said "God doesn't play dice with the universe." Since that time, mostly over the last thirty years, people have followed up some of Einstein's ideas for experiments intended to show that the consequences of standard quantum mechanics are absurd. The experiments have not only confirmed quantum mechanics, but have convincingly shown that if the universe has "hidden variables" to dictate the outcomes of quantum processes, those variables are simultaneously hidden all over the place, not in any particular location. So it looks like Einstein's hunch was probably wrong. van.hep.uiuc.edu Einstein was very unhappy about this apparent randomness in nature. His views were summed up in his famous phrase, 'God does not play dice'. He seemed to have felt that the uncertainty was only provisional: but that there was an underlying reality, in which particles would have well defined positions and speeds, and would evolve according to deterministic laws, in the spirit of Laplace. This reality might be known to God, but the quantum nature of light would prevent us seeing it, except through a glass darkly. Einstein's view was what would now be called, a hidden variable theory. Hidden variable theories might seem to be the most obvious way to incorporate the Uncertainty Principle into physics. They form the basis of the mental picture of the universe, held by many scientists, and almost all philosophers of science. But these hidden variable theories are wrong. The British physicist, John Bell, who died recently, devised an experimental test that would distinguish hidden variable theories. When the experiment was carried out carefully, the results were inconsistent with hidden variables. Thus it seems that even God is bound by the Uncertainty Principle, and can not know both the position, and the speed, of a particle. So God does play dice with the universe. All the evidence points to him being an inveterate gambler, who throws the dice on every possible occasion. hawking.org.uk And everybody makes mistakes. Einstein argued against the existence of black holes, which are now beyond dispute, and disliked the element of chance that underlies quantum theory, saying "God does not play dice with the universe." He also cooked up an unnecessary "cosmological constant" because his theories seemed to require a universe that was expanding or contracting -- a notion that seemed too weird. When observations by U.S. astronomer Edwin Hubble proved that the universe was expanding, he called the constant "the greatest blunder of his life." whyfiles.org