Here’s something I believe but cannot prove:
The common interpretation of quantum mechanics that most scientists hold today is completely and hopelessly wrong. True randomness does not exist in the behavior of subatomic particles. Apparent randomness is just unexplained complexity. Left to itself, all physical matter and energy behaves deteministically, though a supernatural agency (such as God, an angel, or an embodied human soul) can cause matter to act in accord with the free-will decisions of the agency (which are not random, either).
In short, "God does not play dice with the universe."
That means that I agree with Albert Einstein on this (except that I don’t know what he thought about supernatural agency and free will).
This is something that I believe but cannot prove because of the technological limitation resulting in the uncertainty principle.
If we ever find a particle that is acted-upon by electrons without the reverse being true then the limitation vanishes. That would push the problem back one step as we’d now be able to measure what we need about electrons without affecting them, though we still might not be able to measure what we need about the new electron-testing particle. The problem would go away altogether if we found a way to measure all we need about the electron-testing particles without disturbing them and without getting into a regress of new particle-testing particles.
Regardless of whether the problem would be pushed back a step or totally solved, I still believe that all physical matter and energy behaves deterministically, even though we can’t (at least at the moment) prove it.
I’m not a scientist, but
HERE’S AN ARTICLE IN WHICH A BUNCH OF SCIENTISTS WERE ASKED WHAT THEY BELIEVE BUT ARE UNABLE TO PROVE, THUS REVEALING THEIR OWN LEAPS OF FAITH.
Interesting stuff!
(Richard Dawkins’ contribution is no surprise, but at least he admitted that he can’t prove it.)
What do you believe that you cannot prove?
Jimmy, even if God does play dice, doesn’t he still know the outcome? IE, what appears random from our perspective is still not random to God. Also, isn’t observing sub-atomic particles a physical impossibility rather than a technical limitation, the particles required probably don’t exist. Furthermore, couldn’t one say the movement of the planets is “random” when it’s really not at all, the system, (of all stellar bodies) is simply too complex to model properly, and therefore does things we didn’t expect, (like expand at an increasing rate). So it’s more a matter of the limits of observation and a little bit of semantics than science being wrong.
As far as the story, reading some of those guys’ egoist ideas of consciousness based existance and the anti-theism based upon death of children (which is childish and deserves it’s own response), I wonder how these people justify their lives, which perhaps is why I’ve never met anyone in my travels who espouses such sillyness.
GregC has hit on a key distinction: randomness as a manifestation of complexity vs. inherent randomness.
In the former case, we have the probabilistic modeling of a coin flip (or the solar system, as in his example). No one thinks that these events in the macro-world behave any way but deterministically, and so improvements in technology/measurement does improve our understanding. In fact, for the solar system, this type of improvement is still going on.
This contrasts markedly with the *inherent* indeterminism of the quantum world. We simply cannot observe such particles without changing their wavefunctions. Now, one is free to speculate on the nature of the preobserved particles, but that does not changed the observed reality.
If you are looking for a good book on this topic, try The Science Before Science by Anthony Rizzi. The author solved a really old problem in Einstein’s theory, is well-respected in the scientific community and has been interviewed on EWTN.
He makes a lot of interesting points like that science is based on faith (in God) and that inherent order of the created universe is the basis for why we believe the pursuit of science is not futile in the first place. When the empiriometric evidence contradicts common sense (ie believing that things do not exist unless they are observed or that the universe itself is just a figment of our imaginations) then you know you do not have the whole story.
Right now I am in the chapter on the Big Bang, relativity, and evolution. Very good reading. I am of the opinion that everyone who can read should try to get their brains wrapped around this book. I am buying copies from authorhouse.com and sending them to anyone who expresses even mild interest.
It’s my impression that current Quantum Mechanical thought would say that the Uncertainty Principal is a reality and not a physical measuring limitation. This means that there is no classical-like interaction going on that we are simply unable to measure precisely enough, but rather some other interaction, the outcome of which we simply cannot know past a certain degree of precision.
Another interesting point is that this principal is inherent in the equations governing QM– in a sense, it can be shown to be a consequence of the mathematical formulation of the theory and not just as the result of a particle-interaction thought experiment.
I happen to believe both in Quantum Mechanics and determinism. Where we perceive randomness, God now only knows what is going on but is driving as well. Inbedded in here is a mystery about the way the world works and God interacts with it that we may never fully understand, like the mystery of how God’s Grace interacts with the freedom of our wills. I like to think of the world of uncertainty as the region where God can work and we can’t call him on it. He’s speaking in a kind of proverbial silence.
The problem is that most great physicists are horrible theologians– in one of his books, Steven Hawking actually said that even God can’t know the outcome of a quantum mechanical event. There is a tendancy on their part to think of God simple as a real smart personality who is tuned in to all of the universe as it unfolds, rather than the creator of everything who wills everything at every moment to exist. The motto of this story is while you might be able to trust a physicist to tell you principles about how the world works, don’t trust him to tell you its philosophical implication.
I remember years ago standing on the balcony of a hotel room that overlooked a highway off-ramp. As I stood there I began to watch the cars go by, some leaving the highway at the off-ramp and some staying on. I reasoned that if you stood there long enough you could figure pretty closely the statistical probability that any single car would exit the highway or not. You could probably come up with something pretty accurate, especially if you spent more time observing the off-ramp. But it occurred to me that the probability really had nothing to do with the facts. The truth is, the cars left the highway for purely deterministic reasons rooted in free will. People wanted to get home, or pick up a gallon of milk or whatever. Observation from the balcony would never give us access to the kind of information we would need to determine where any single car would go. The statistical probability is just the closest we can get without actually asking the people in the cars. In other words – it’s easier. I think the same could be true of subatomic particles. In truth their actions may be permanently incalculable, but treating them as though they were random at least leaves us with some crude statistical understanding.
You might also have a look at Wolfgang Smith’s The Quantum Enigma. He offers an Thomistic philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Uncertainty is a fact. It isn’t so much quantum mechanics as it is a simple problem of mechanics at decreasing scales, or increasing accuracy of measurement. The various gendanken traded by “Al” and Heisenberg are quite interesting. Suffice it to say, Einstein had his lunch handed to him.
The more truobling aspects of quantum mechanics are those verified on an experimental level, including “strange action at a distance,” superposition of states, and Bell’s theorem. Study of these may soon yeild technologies that could change the world as we know it. Most worrisome is the idea that a quantum computer based on yet-to-fabricated three dimensional electron traps could yeild a machine capable of instantaneously factoring any number… including the huge primes responsible for the strongest modern cryptographic schemes. The math is there, every though the engineering isn’t… yet. Ironically, the answer is a cryptology techology based on split-beam polarization. Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone has figured out how to transmit a message further than the coherence length of a laser (meters at best) so this one is awaiting its own Einstein. As is QM in general.
Theologically, this is not at all troubling. God’s eternal nature affords him a certain luxury as concerns causality.
True! I have always figured that God was allowed to make something random if he wanted to. Creating freewill is certainly a similar paradox.