From: mike99 (mike99@lascruces.com)
Date: Mon May 15 2006 - 17:09:56 MDT
London Times online
"Loading the dice against free will:
A battle is waging in physics that could strip us of all sense of personal
responsibility"
by Bryan Appleyard
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Tricky. Was it inevitable
that I should write this and that, now, you should be reading it? Even
trickier.
The angels-pin question was originally posed as a joke. It lampooned the
arcane and futile speculations of medieval theologians. They pondered the
nature of the world on the basis of faith and, in our terms, profound
ignorance. We have hard science. We have moved beyond such nonsense. Or have
we?
Gerard ’t Hooft of Utrecht University is one of the world’s great
physicists. In 1999, along with Martin Veltman, he won the Nobel prize “for
elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics”.
But, like all physicists, he has a problem, a problem so huge that, daily,
it threatens to undermine the entire fabric of his discipline.
The problem is complex — some say it is beyond solution by the human mind —
but it can be simply stated. Relativity and quantum theory are the two great
triumphs of modern physics. The first explains the behaviour of very big
things like planets, the second the behaviour of very small things like
subatomic particles. They both lie, currently, beyond refutation. Planets do
behave as relativity predicts and subatomic particles obey quantum theory —
if they didn’t I couldn’t now be writing this on a computer and you would
not be able to watch the World Cup on television.
The problem is that they contradict each other. Relativity is a “classical
theory”, it can be demonstrated to act through known processes of cause and
effect. Quantum theory is not. Subatomic particles behave like
schizophrenics on acid. They seem to be telling us that the world is
indeterminate, unpredictable and completely lacking in anything resembling
our common-sense understanding of cause and effect.
Einstein hated this, arguing that “God does not play dice”. There must be
something we didn’t know, some “hidden variables” that lay behind quantum
phenomena that would, one day, return the quantum world safely to the bosom
of classical physics. To which the quantum theorists’ response is: God does
not play dice but only because he runs the casino. The indeterminacy of
quantum phenomena is real and final, it is just the way the universe is
made. Enter ’t Hooft.
He has just published a paper arguing that, in effect, Einstein was right.
There are recognisable systems of cause and effect underlying quantum
interactions. There is a hidden reality which consists of “states” that do
behave deterministically. We don’t see them because they are so small and
because their actions are very brief. What we see is only an outcome that
appears to have no cause.
Meanwhile, over at Princeton University, two of the world’s great
mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, have produced another paper —
The Free Will Theorem — arguing exactly the opposite: that the world is
indeed finally and absolutely indeterminate.
...read more at...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2179197,00.html
Regards,
Michael LaTorra
mike99@lascruces.com
mlatorra@nmsu.edu
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