...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
Ami
Each Second Is
A Universe
Kew
Mental Exercise
Ryle
Sunspot
True Story
Very Large Array

True Story #2

It took me a while to think about the question of Einstein's dice. Here is a small description (far from expert, and not intended to solve any mysteries). Here goes.

In the 1930s, in response to the work of fellow physicists, Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, on what they called 'indeterminacy' and 'complementarity', Einstein famously said that, 'God does not play dice'. He was referring to his colleagues' theories that the behaviour and whereabouts of sub-atomic particles cannot be wholly determined. That is, the more we may know about a particle's momentum the less we know about its position, or on the contrary, if we can know its position, we know less about where it came from or where it is going (at least I think that's how it goes). For Einstein, this implied that there was a certain degree of chance in the disposition of things in the observed world, a notion which ran counter to his belief in both the existence of reality and science's ability to reveal absolute truths about that reality.

For Einstein, the work of his colleagues suggested that the world is configured in a certain way depending on how we look at it and that our knowledge of things is always only partial, never complete. 'What we see is not nature but nature exposed to our methods of questioning', (Heisenberg). To have an element of chance woven into the fabric of reality was a direct challenge to the idea that science could fully know the world upon which it meditated. If reality was governed by laws which allowed the possibility of chance, what would this imply about our knowledge of - and place within - the world? Is the everyday world really what we think it is in common sense terms, independent of our perceptions of it, or do we in some way, determine what we look at when we look at it?

Phew.

(Tim O'Riley, fragment of an email correspondence, 7th December 2001)