albert einstein once said, "god does not play dice." but doesnt the heisenberg uncertainty principle mean that god does exactly that? seems to me that they are completely opposite theories, and einstein is regarded as the science god, and the uncertainty principle is regarded as fact. so whats the deal? who can explain this?
2010-07-14T11:30:47Z
wow everyone. thanks so much. this is exactly what i was hoping for. i just love to see what people who know so much about these things have to say about them. and yea i just wanted to make it clear that i wasnt speaking of a literal god, just a metaphorical one.
Drostie2010-07-14T03:16:01Z
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Well, no, not strictly. First, Einstein is not "the science god" in the sense of infallibility; Einstein made a bunch of mistakes. His proofs of E = mc², for example, were pretty uniformly inadequate. Others have since proven the statement much more rigorously. His journals show that he made several huge time-wasting blunders at first when he was working on general relativity. And so on.
Einstein's statement is a reaction to the Copenhagen interpretation of measurement. The uncertainty principle is very different.
Look at it this way: we can get quantum mechanics to be deterministic if we commit ourselves to the objective reality of the wavefunction ψ. Then ψ evolves deterministically according to the Schrödinger equation, which guarantees the Heisenberg uncertainty principle directly. (The Heisenberg idea: as you try to fix the position of a particle precisely, you require it to have a small size, and therefore a small wavelength. Since de Broglie observed p = h / λ, where p is the momentum, λ is the wavelength, and h is Planck's constant, compressing λ leads to a corresponding broadening of p.)
What Einstein was objecting to was very different: he says, ψ isn't enough. Why not? Well, because: it is possible for my television to occupy two different places in my house: living room and bedroom. In the Dirac language of quantum mechanics, we could say that:
| TV > = a | bedroom > + b | living room >.
With the condition that |a|² + |b|² = 1.
Now, there is an aspect of the above quantum mechanics which Einstein didn't understand then, but which we now understand much better, called /decoherence theory/, which says that, given the amount of light and air molecules getting caught up with the TV, this quantum superposition must become a classical superposition: |a|² in the bedroom, |b|² in the living room, with no more quantum interference terms. Quantum effects disappear.
However, here is the problem, called the measurement problem. We don't see a television which is |a|² in the bedroom and |b|² in the living room. Not unless we drop it off of the roof, scoop it up, and put it in two piles in those respective rooms! No, the television is either in one room or the other.
This also happens with light. We get these beautiful wave interference effects with light, but ultimately, our photomultiplier tubes register distinct clicks when a photon hits them. The wavefunction ψ which describes the light is distributed over many distinct photomultiplier tubes: but instead of all of them firing a little, one of them fires a lot.
So the light has to "make up its mind" at some point, even though our best description has the light's wavefunction distributed over all of its options. The Copenhagen interpretation, which Einstein was objecting to with this quote, says that it works like this: the light particle just chooses randomly from its options, weighed by |ψ(o)|² for each option o. Einstein was saying in effect, "no, there has to be something which *causes the light* to choose *this particular option*."
Yes, Einstein is the god of science. Heisenberg's uncertainity principle should not be compared with Einstein's theories. Uncertainity principle is of no use and reflects no complexity. It does not influence the modern physics. It just can be considered as a fact. It can never be considered as a theory. Heisenberg cannot even be considered as an intelligent as uncertainity principle requires no unique intelligence. Every one from the beginning, knew the fact. Even a teenager (11-15) know it. No in the history (past) of the earth and even in the future can't be compared with Einstein, the great, the genius of the geniuses, the father of modern physics, the god of science, an ambassador of peace, a synonym of intellience & non-selfishness, the greatest revolutionary and influnential scientist, the greatest scientist who changed the world and our view of the world, who disproved the laws of Newton, who was thought to be great. And Einstein was not dependent on Newton's laws at all.
"albert einstein once said, "god does not play dice." but doesnt the heisenberg uncertainty principle mean that god does exactly that?"
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is not a statement about the nature of a deity but rather about the possibility of any observer to make simultaneous measurement of pairs of quantities like position and velocity, or amplitude and phase. Pairs of measurable quantities called "non-commuting observables" cannot simultaneously be known to infinite precision. It is a mathematical truth about the quantum mechanics formalism that is usually "interpreted" in plain language to be a statement about the nature of systems themselves, for example an object with highly constrained velocity must have a highly unconstrained position.
Einstein's famous "does not play dice" quip was an expression of his distaste for the apparent randomness in quantum measurement. This randomness is a part of quantum mechanics not as a consequence of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle; it is prior to it.
"seems to me that they are completely opposite theories, and einstein is regarded as the science god"
No, merely as an unusually insightful theorist. He was also wrong about many things. About quantum mechanics he was wrong for non-respectable reasons: his opinion was based on taste and not on science.
"and the uncertainty principle is regarded as fact. so whats the deal? who can explain this?"
A good quantum mechanics book is your best bet, to understand both the nature of randomness in quantum mechanics and (precisely) what the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is. To learn how we know that Einstein was wrong and quantum mechanical randomness is in a certain sense a "correct" description of reality, search the Web for "Bell's Inequality"; experiments of Alain Aspect, among others, proved that local hidden variable theories do not describe the universe in which we live. Discussion of this is beyond the scope of a simple "answer" to your question.
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You assume that all naturalistic processes are deterministic. You're not in bad company on that. Einsteins "God does not play dice with the universe" supports mathematical determinism. On the other hand, the Copenhagen Interpretation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle suggests that the universe is not deterministic at the quantum level. This means that at the chemical level, the neurotransmitter / receptor level, the critical threshold for neuronal activation is not strictly formulaic. This would suggest that free will does not require God.