Author: Mark Ryan
Date: 17:42:34 08/18/05
Go up one level in this thread
On August 16, 2005 at 05:04:05, Theo van der Storm wrote: >PS: On the subject of quantum mechanics Einstein first stated: >"God doesn't play dice" and later admitted that it was one of his biggest >mistakes. I did not know that Einstein admitted it was a mistake. Maybe it is a matter of interpretation: http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3518580 "Einstein was profoundly uncomfortable with both uncertainty and non-locality. From that time until the end of his life in 1955 (making 2005 also the 50th anniversary of his death) he worked to eliminate them from physics. But despite the fame of Einstein's statement that “God does not play dice”, he did not believe that quantum mechanics was fundamentally incorrect. Indeed, he was the first to propose Schrödinger and Heisenberg - — whose reputations were not established at the time - — for Nobel prizes. Rather, he believed it was incomplete. The best analogy here is to temperature. Temperature does not really exist. When something is said to be hot or cold, what is actually being described is the average speed of the molecules of which that something is made. If the molecules are moving quickly, it is hot, and if slowly, then cold. Temperature is merely a succinct encapsulation of this average. Similarly, Einstein believed that quantum mechanics was describing some sort of statistical average of an underlying phenomenon that was deterministic."
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.