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Subject: He plays at dice (slightly OT)

Author: Theo van der Storm

Date: 14:18:10 03/05/05

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On March 04, 2005 at 10:15:35, Ingo Althofer wrote:
>Dear Theo,
>
>thanks for your nice posting, but ...
>
>> Subject: Ein Stein Wuerfelt nicht (One stone doesn't throw dice)
>> Posted by Theo van der Storm (Profile) on March 03, 2005 at 16:22:45:
>> ...
>Until here, everything is fine. (Perhaps the translation of the
>game's title to English would be a bit more precise by writing
>"A single stone does not throw dice".)
>
>But now you write something that cries for a revenge ;-)
>
>> By the way, I discarded Ingo Althöfer's strategic advice
>> - as explained by Gerd and others - right away and played my own strategy.
>
>You must have had a bandwaggon full of luck with the dice.
>(The same had Dan Wulff in Paderborn against me...)

quoting relevant text with Einstein, Dice, Bandwagon, God.

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v03/0200.html
(Date: Mon, 3 Jul 89 03:24 EDT  From: John McDaid <MCDAID@NYUACF>)

"Quantum theories have a body of experimental support. In point of
fact, the objection which Einstein (along with Podolsky and Rosen) proposed
to quantum mechanics is what prompted Bohr to postulate indeterminacy as
a "law of nature," in that the macroworld (us) could only make probabilistic
assertions about the quantum. According to this interpretation, there is no
"disturbance," rather, until the point of measurement, there is only a wave
function. We have, finally, to give up our anthropocentric notion that reality
on the quantum level must be just like the world we grew up in so we can
understand it.

In response to Einstein's "Der Herrgott Würfelt Nicht,"
Stephen Hawkings has said, "Not only does God play at dice, but sometimes
He throws them where you can't see them."

I am most at a loss, I must confess, when to answer his question of why
humanists jump on the "bandwagon" of quantum mechanics, Richmond finds
that we are, at bottom, victims of a weak-minded subjectivist self
deception. The logical extension of Indeterminacy is not a Panglossian "best
of all possible worlds," but rather a tough-minded intellectual honesty
which -- like Popper -- is constantly attempting refine its approximations.
Teachers are not scientists, poking quanta of information into the heads of
students. I would hope that by now, the model of the college classroom
would be one of a holistic system in which the "students" and "professor"
are cooperating in the enterprise of discovery."

Theo



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