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To: George Coyne who wrote (41822)	4/8/1999 10:05:00 AM
From: TigerPaw	Respond to of 67261

What is so special about fundamental particles? This is thought to be the source of randomness in our universe. They say repetition is the best teacher so I'll go over this once again. Issac Newton formulated mathmatics which described forces (most famously the force of gravity). One of the principles he based this on is often described as For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. From this and some formulas, the path of any object could be predicted from the initial conditions. For the next few hundred years the math was refined (or complicated to my mind) to account for more effects. Among the theroms was the conclusion that if Newton was right, then all of the universe would unfold to it's next state with absolute precision. This means that the conditions which may cause a drop of rain 100 years from now are setup now, and were setup a thousand thousand years ago. The word for this is deterministic. It was already known in Newton's day that some apparently simple problems such as the orbit of three planets could not be calculated exactly. This means we cannot exactly predict the future even if it is unfolding deterministic. The implication of deterministic reactions though is that even though we cannot predict the outcome, there is an exact outcome. Philosoficly this means the future is fixed, even though we cannot predict what that future is. This kinds of uncalculatable problems are part of the field of chaos. Okay, if Newton is right then all of the future is preordained even if we can't figure out what comes next. About a hundred years ago atomic theories of physics were developed. A scientist named Heisenburg asked the question How much could we know about the atoms ?. The only way to get information from an atom was to cause some sort of interaction with another atom to measure the results. The act of measurment changes the first atom, so you can never really be sure what it was like before you measured it. This was known as the uncertainty principle. In his day it really measured the amount of chaos inherient to various systems. After the splitting of the atom and the realization that atomic particles are made from smaller loops of energy (known as quarks and leptons) the uncertainty calculations were carried out with these smaller items (implying more precision). It was noticed that these interactions, which cannot be measured exactly (since the measurement changes the thing it is measuring) had a statistical spread which did not converge. Normally if you can't measure something as accurate as you would like, you measure it over and over and use statistics to give you a better answer. At the smallest level, at this threshold of uncertainty, the statistics do not lead to a better answer, they remain a blurred spread of values. The implication here is that these interactions are not following Newton's rule For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction but instead say that the reaction has a random component also. This kind of random is what I meant by 'truly' random. It's more than just something too complicated to calculate, it's something where the result is not really the sum of forces which acted upon it. (By the way, since the random component is statisticly spread out evenly, it also means that this extra effect is not goal directed, that is to say it is not the result of an undiscovered force or the hand of god tweaking things at the smallest level). It is this "truly random event" which leads to free will. The future is not only too complicated to calculate, it is not fixed and certain at all. This would be true even if the complete state of the universe were known at a particular time. The next state would still be random (within the bounds of the uncertainty - I don't mean to imply the universe is set to fly apart at any instance). TP