Re: No new Einstein

Eugene Stefanovich wrote:
> cmaj10@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> > The real question is: Is nature deterministic or not? You seem to
> > adhere to the view that it is not deterministic. But let's confirm this
> > with this question: Given a pair of perfectly identical nuclei having
> > EXACTLY THE SAME STATE {to every imaginable and inimaginable detail),
> > and with similar neighborhoods. Does it seem plausible to you that they
> > will take different amounts of time to decay?
>
> I cannot say about "unimaginable detail", because I cannot imagine it.

I know that a butterfly flapping its wings in the amazonian jungle
might affect my life in a big way. That's just one thing I could
imagine, but I don't need to imagine all wing flapping things on earth
in order to conclude that other inimaginable wing flapping things might
also affect my life. Just because I've always worn sunshades doesn't
mean the world is black and white, it's just that I don't have enough
imagination about colors. The same goes for everything else; it's
enough for me to know that my imagination is limited to keep me out of
the trouble of writing stuff that might very well be laughed at two
centuries from now.

> But if two nuclei are prepared in exactly (to every imaginable detail)
> the same states, they will surely take different amounts of time to
> decay. The nature is not deterministic. This is the main lesson of
> quantum mechanics.
>
> Of course, one can hope that this is not true, and that there are
> some yet unknown hidden parameters that someday will allow us
> to return to the classical deterministic picture; some "alarm clock"
> hidden within the nucleus that tells the nucleus at what exact time
> to disintegrate. I don't share these hopes. Though I don't have a proof
> that such hopes are groundless.
>
> Eugene.

Fair enough, that's a far cry from the initial claim that "QM is
probabilistic because nature is probabilistic", but it's much better.

Chris

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