Sunday, September 21, 2008

The Hand that throws the dice :)

Reading Richard's latest post, I eventually stumble upon his reading list for the 9th September. A little way down I find Ian Stewart's Does God play Dice with its reference to Einstein's famous statement that he didn't believe that God played dice with the universe, and suddenly realise what's been troubling me about that remark ever since the first time I heard it.

Which is that, in classical mechanics at least, throwing dice gives you a perfectly causal and non-random result!

Posted by at 10:48 AM

3 comments:

  1. How flattering that you've read my reading list :-)

    I don't suppose Einstein thought of the full implications of what he said, or that he believed in God, certainly not in the big, big, super God of Christian theology who could hardly have played any sort of game of chance with himself, though he could presumably have made it look like that to inhabitants of his creation.
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  2. Yes, that's always pointed out by scientist types when creationist types try to use Einstein's comment as an argument.

    Still, it's odd. There doesn't seem to be a way you can have just a *little* bit of what you might call "true randomness" in the universe, at points where it's tactically convenient. It seems that either nothing is random (classical mechanics) or everything has a random component (the current understanding).

    I find it very difficult to imagine what true randomness might actually be, my mind seems naturally to conceive of it as an artefact of hidden variables. Which means, of course, that it's really not random.

    You can't really say "it's just the probability distribution" since that's just a measurement, or description, not an explanation. But if there's no hidden variables, then there's nothing left to explain randomness with. Does the notion of "explaining" it implicitly presuppose that the explanation be non-random?
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  3. I think it is very difficult to say precisely what explanation amounts to. We like to know how things work, and discovery of some sort of mechanism is satisfying. However theoretical science seems no longer to offer anything much like the sort of mechanism we encounter in our everyday lives.

    Any explanation takes for granted regularities for which we might in principle demand an explanation.

    If someone explains a piece of clockwork by showing how the cog-wheels engage in each other, it is still possible to ask why the motion of one cog wheel should be accompanied by the motion of another wheel that it engages.

    There;'s quite a lot about explanation in my philosophy notes:
    http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jrt2761/philosophy.html
    see chapter 6
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