Does God play dice with the universe?

[jack]

It only recently occurred to me that people who objected to the non-deterministic nature of quantum mechanics were *right* if you think many-worlds interpretation is correct.

It's like, since Newton, physicists had a tacit assumption:

#1. The laws of physics are deterministic.

But then we discovered lots of evidence for QM that we couldn't ignore, and many people adopted a different assumption:

#2. The evidence for QM

And these seemed contradictory, so people who had #1 were (rightly) suspicious of #2, but people who accepted #2 felt they had no choice but to reject #1.

But was also assuming without even realising:

#3: there is only one universe, not a giant number of parallel universes

And it turns out that if you drop #3, you can keep #1 and #2.

Now, I don't think that's sufficient reason by itself to assume MWI. There are lots of other paradoxes that disappear (if QM works the way we think it does, though many physicists still think that is premature). But it's interesting that we might have to drop #1 one day, but not yet.

And I knew all that _in theory_, but I'd not actually stopped to think about Einstein's "god plays dice" quip since I learned slightly more about MWI.

Comments

[ptc24]

I think Bohmian mechanics (and other global hidden variables interpretations?) lets you assume #1 and #2 and #3 - it has problems of its own though. I still haven't got my head around superdeterminism and whether it's an issue, for one.

That said, with hidden variables, you might imagine a deistic god who played dice once but who has now put the dice back in the box in order to sit back and observe the consequences.

While we're on QM, I was reading Wikipedia, and came across the wonderful German phrase Kopenhagener Geist der Quantentheorie - Geist here is presumably as in Zeitgeist.

ObChemist: "Electron density is the square of the wavefunction. 'nuff said... for chemistry, at least."

[gerald_duck]

Are you aware of the concept of quantum immortality? I find it intriguing. Probably even more so than Schrodinger's Cat.

Whereas Schrodinger attempted to provide an obviously absurd interpretation of quantum physics and was (as I understand it) surprised people accepted it at face value, it's much harder to accept any theory that implies quantum immortality.

Personally, on an unreasoned, emotive level, my instinct is that sooner or later people will start modelling QM as chaotic rather than fundamentally unknowable. That would square #1 with #2 in a more satisfactory way than MWI.