“God doesn’t play dice with the universe”-- Einstein
Einstein believed that God doesn’t play dice with the universe. Although, he was not a believer, what he meant by the sentence is everything around us can be described or understood by physical law. There is no uncertainty. But it turned out he was wrong. God is the biggest gambler of us all.
It turned out that the world works on probability. Well, perhaps we can predict everyday’s phenomenon but the particles, atoms, molecules which turned out to be the building block of everything has their totally unpredictable motion. They are so small and so fast that we can never know for sure what is their position exactly in a particular moment? But that doesn’t mean that we can’t predict it to a certain extent. The word Prediction is deeply related to the word probability. Now the question is, what do I mean by probability?
Well, when I was a child I was a fan of thriller movies. In one Indian movie there was a character of serial a killer. He used to give his victims choices before he kill them. If the outcome of the coin he is going to toss is head, the victim will live. If it is tail victim has to die. So there is 50% percent probability of each outcome. It is called playing on luck or chance or in a gambler’s word it is a gamble. The same situation happens when we throw a dice. Here for each outcome the probability is one over six (1/6) as there can be any of those six outcome. If you say, it will come 3 the chance is 1/6. If you are lucky enough, you will win otherwise you will lose.
Dice | source
A sacrifice for a new theory to come
I think, there is no physics and chemistry student who doesn’t know about Maxwell-Boltzmann probability distribution on motion of particle’s velocity. It is a theory used for speed of particles in ideal gas as the particles can move freely without interacting with each other. Anyway that is not the topics today. It is Boltzmann who believed in probability for constructing his atomic theory. He was ahead of his time. So he had to go through a lot of criticism. In the end he gave up and hanged himself at the age of 62.
Ludwig Boltzmann | source
The greatest debate of physics
Aristotle, Socrates and so many of the Greek philosophers believed that debating about a problem is the best way to reach to the best solution for that problem. The debate can be bitter but the focus is always to find the best solution for a problem. In political words we call it democracy. But any way so many scientists had debated about the nature of light. Some said it is particle some said wave.
The famous Sir Isaac Newton proposed that light is made of small particle called corpuscles. His theory could easily explain reflection and refraction of light but it couldn’t predict diffraction, polarization and interference of light. But this theory survived for about hundred years probably because of Newton’s fame.
“Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” -- Alexander Pope
Sir Issac Newton | source
During his time Christian Huygens had another opinion about the nature of light. He said light is wave. His theory is called the wave front theory. Huygens proposed that-
“Every point on a wave-front can be thought of a source of secondary wavelet and they spreads out at the speed of light and the new wave-front is tangential to all the secondary wavelets.”
Huygens wave-front theory | source
This theory predicted diffraction and interference perfectly. But as Newton’s fame was so undeniable, this theory never came to limelight until a young physicist named Thomas Young showed by double slit experiment that wave theory can explain interference. He believed wave theory explains the true nature of light.
Let us think of a football player shooting footballs toward the net but we put a wall in between the footballer and the net with two gaps. Most of the balls would bounce back hitting the wall, but some of them would pass. Now if we close one of the gaps, we will observe there is a certain place where the footballs are gathering. Now if we close the first gap and open the other one, we will find another place where the football will gather. And now if we open both of them, the result is the sum of the previous result when one of the gaps was opened. This is like our everyday’s experience. But wait, here comes the twist.
How Double slit experiment should look like | source
But when we throw photons or other particles, the story is totally different. There is places where there is bright band and the places in between each two bright band is a dark band. You may say “you are kidding, right?” No, my friends I am not.
Double slit experiment | source
It happens because of light behaves like a wave here as it passes through those slits. The slits allow the waves to interfere. The place where the top of two waves meet, there we find the bright band and where top of one wave meets the bottom of other one, they cancel each other and we get the dark band. This how it shows the wave nature of light.
During 1860, a Scottish physicist named James Clerk Maxwell discovered that changing magnetic field can produce electricity which was based on experiment. He put forward four equations. When he tried to solve them he find wave like solution. As a result of solving those equations he found a number which is 310,740,000 meters per second and he immediately got that is the speed of light. He proposed light is an electromagnetic wave. But there was no proof until Hertz discovered radio waves and showed by experiment that light is of course an electromagnetic wave. So, people thought this the end of the debate.
Maxwell equations | source
Photon
Beginning of 19th century was the beginning of new era. It was sure that light is an electromagnetic wave until a new invention came up called photoelectric effect. Now the question is what is photoelectric effect?
When light shines on a material, it emits electrons. What happens here is when light shines on a material it makes the atoms in the material to be excited and the atoms emit electrons. But the problem was that not every light emit electron, light with a particular frequency does that. If light is wave, this phenomenon should happen for all waves not depending on their frequency.
Albert Einstein was fascinated by this phenomenon and tried to explain it. He proposed light is neither wave nor particle it is combination of both and he called it wave packet in other words photon which says light travels in discrete bundle of electromagnetic energy. In 1921, this theory won him the long awaited Noble Prize he deserved but it opened the gate for a new field called quantum mechanics which says we can’t predict everything precisely but to a certain extent we can. That means actually saying that everything works on probability.
Photo electric effect | source
Wave particle duality of light
Light is wave at the same time particle. So what is a particle? Particle is something which has a fixed position. On the other side wave is something which doesn’t have a fixed position rather it has wavelength. So how can something be a wave and at the same time a particle?
Let me give you an example. Think that you have a girlfriend who studies with you and you are most of the time with her. So, now if a friend of yours asks another friend where you are now. The answer will be you are with your girl friend. So your position is fixed, you are a particle. But wait, now if he asks where you both are? Then the other friend said somewhere in the campus. Now your position is spread over the campus, there is certainty that in someplace where both of you usually go but it is not for sure. Here again comes the concept of probability. Now my friend, you are wave. Hope you have understood the concept of wave particle duality.
The proof came from De Broglie equation that says wavelength is equal to Plank’s constant over momentum. Here wavelength is a property of wave but momentum is a property of particle. This proved wave particle duality.
De Broglie equation |source
Uncertainty principle
“We can’t measure position and momentum of a particle precisely at the same time. In another way the more precisely we measure the position, less precisely we know the momentum and vice-versa Multiplying the errors is always more than Plank’s constant over 2 pi.”
Uncertainty principle | source
So it means that if we want to find a particle we can’t find exactly where it is. We can find a probability of the particle to be somewhere in a place. The sum of total probability is one. Einstein couldn’t
agree so he said that God doesn’t play dice with universe.
Conclusion
It is an infinite universe. Every single point is its center. But everything in this universe is made of tiny particles. Motions of these particles are unpredictable. Probability plays its role here. So our very existence depends on chance and still we are here, existing. So, God does play dice and he plays it better than anyone.
Really? Are we better than each other when it comes to rolling an unloaded die?
You clearly haven't seen my nephew role a dice, he's 7 years old and has the most "cheaty" way of rolling a dice I ever saw (they don't actually role half the time). But yes, taking "playing dice" to equal a "fully random generation of a result" then yes, it is an oxymoron to suggest that anyone can play it better than anyone as else as surely it would otherwise defy the definition of random.
well with respect that was not the concept of the story. Its not a religious post. Its just quantum mechanics which works most on probility. Nature or God what take us here pPlayed the dice so well that you are still here and breathing. That was the meaning of scentence
I somehow understand the Bible in the way that God is the beginning and the end. But can't interfere in the middle. He kind of sets the billard balls in motion in a vacuum playing field with borders, and then it evolves and evolves.
I must respectfully disagree.
You claim Einstein was wrong, however you fail to mention Hugh Everett's
Theory of universal wave function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_wavefunction
It was Everett 's PhD thesis that contain's the argument for super determinism.
The concept of randomness only exists in the limited mind of a mortal.
bro i am sorry but i write the post so that people understand it good, I am not writting a PhD thesis here :)
So I always get confused by quantum physics and so on. But isn't it interesting to consider intentionality besides probability? The way I understood it the wave particle duality is actually influenced by the intentionality accompanying an observation event. And so this leads to considerations of consciousness and Einstein's Unified Field Theory that he never quite sewed up to his satisfaction (which leads to chin-rubbing esoterical ponderings about the nature of "God").
Thanks for sharing. Kate
nice write up @anasav.... your explanation on uncertainty principle using a boy and his girlfriend w8as superb.....i really like your write up👍
I just followed you
thank you. I tried my best to make the concepts clear :)
I like the conclusion. It was hard to me read the way, but with conclusion I agree, experienced as a "dice" as myself.
Matter, waves and consciousness are related. Like a TV screen blinks and makes moving video, matter is blinking millions of times a second from matter to a wave. There is good energy and bad energy controlled by our minds so always be optimistic, you could influence the world to be a better place.
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I laugh at people who can't read between the lines, he's not writing to make a thesis of phd, it's just clarifying something, is it a sin to comment? we are free to differ from one theory if we have our bases and arguments we can argue any theory, that does not mean that we denigrate that of others.
By the way, I'm following you.
It is not a sin to comment but we dont need to talk about what he talked about. The post is about simple wave or particle behaviour. Wave functions are a part of quantum mechanics and its a bit complicated to explain. Its ok if she would explain but we dont need here the theory of super determinism. I am surprised to see here that this post is about light and all the comments are about the headings which may be writer wrote to make the post look better. It takes me to the conclusion, does people read anything about the content or just the intro and conclusion and conclude themself by commenting @arcabuzx (50)
Be it resolved that in the future, a "murmuration" of starlings will now be referred to as a "Boltzmann" of starlings.
There is another rather interesting way of looking at the statistical nature of quantum mechanics. If you consider that all change is basically a phase change, and if phase changes are calculated on the Complex number plane, then they are non-linear and therefor non-computable. You can still pull out a meaningful statistical answer, but it's like knowing that a certain area range of the Mandbrot is 50% in the set, 50% out. That you can determine. There is an interesting Arxiv paper.....
"The Invariant Set Postulate: A New Geometric Framework for the Foundations of Quantum Theory and the Role Played by Gravity"
https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.1148
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