what did einstein mean when he said "god does not play dice"?

Question

i have to choose a quote and write a paper on it and i was wondering if i could get more in depth info on this quote.. i know it has something to do with quantam theory.

Answer 1

It all started with Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle. This rule suggests that because of the apparatus we use, we can't gain information about particles past a certain degree of accuracy... we can know either a particle's position OR its momentum exactly, but the more accurately we know one the less accurately we know the other.

Now, you wouldn't think something like this would cause problems, and for most people it doesn't. Things only get so accurate - so what? The problem arises with some physicists who get a little too involved in their equations and start to begin to confuse their equations with explantions of reality instead of descriptions of it. Presented with the Uncertainty Principle, they would say that the reason you can't measure both those things is because a particle simply doesn't have them.

And it got much, much worse with Schrödinger's equations. Schrödinger came up with some very good ways to predict the behaviour of electrons around a nucleus of an atom, but his equations could never say with any certainty exactly where any particular electron would be found (the Uncertainty Principle rearing its head again). Instead, his equations gave answer like, 'there's a 10% chance of finding it over here, and a 40% chance of finding it in this spot' and so on.

Well, you can imagine what some overzealous physicists did with this. They began to declare the electrons did not actually physically exist until you looked at them. That instead of really being in one place or another, they were in all the places simultaneously (or even in all places in the universe simultaneously). But only when you weren't looking... which made it a perfectly unscientific declaration, because it was impossible to disprove. How do you prove what's happening when you're not looking?

Einstein did not particularly like these ideas. To him, something was there or not, and saying it's 30% there is like saying you're 30% pregnant. Thus his refutation that, "God does not play dice." He felt that even if WE don't know and can't find out the answers to these questions, there do exist answers nonetheless. Even particles must be in one place or another, whether or not we know what that place is.

Many physicists nowadays still consider his objection backward and outmoded, but then neither do they really have better explanations for their ideas other than the math they use. I'll leave it to you which side you wish to be on! Hope that helps!

Answer 2

This statement revolves around the question whether the universe behaves in a capricious manner (like the throw of the dice) or a deterministic manner (like a mechanical clock.) The world view of classical physics through the end of the 19th century was that the universe runs like clockwork and is deterministic in nature. This was Einstein's view as well. Being a deeply religious man as well as a brilliant scientist he could not bring himself to believe that God would "play dice with the universe." At the end of the 19th century and throughout the early part of the 20th century, however, various new discoveries were made regarding atomic and subatomic particles and waves and new theories set forth to explain them which made it increasingly difficult to accept a mechanistic deterministic view of the universe. Some of these are described above by Ted and Fermi of Borg, most notably Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the development of quantum mechanics which deals with the behavior of matter on the scale of atoms and subatomic particles and waves. Classical physics had shown since Newton that if you know the position of stars and planets and details about their motions that you can predict where they will be in the future. For subatomic particles, Heisenberg showed that due to the uncertainty principle one cannot know both the precise position and momentum of a particle like an electron at a given instant, so its future motion cannot be determined, but only a range of possibilities for the future motion of the particle can be described. This introduced the element of chance or probability (as in the roll of the dice) into modern physics. The argument as to whether the universe is more like the roll of the dice or a clock rages on even today although most contemporary physicists would side with Heisenberg and the other proponents of quantum theory over Einstein. Curiously, the ancient Greeks would have had no difficulty accepting that God plays dice. They even "caused" their gods to foretell the outcomes of future events by throwing dice in their temples. Strange, isn't it, how fashions even in religion and scientific belief change throughout history.

Answer 3

Quantum mechanics says that the most fundamental particles in the universe do not behave in a deterministic way.

In Einstein's universe, a particle is like a billiard ball. If you know enough information about it, you not only know exactly where it is moving next but also from where it has moved. It may be complicated, but if you knew all of this information about every particle (every "billiard ball") in the universe, you could trace all motion forward and backwards through all of time. The world was deterministic. It was a "clockwork universe."

Quantum mechanics says that the fundamental particles do not behave this way. Instead, they follow probability distributions. You cannot say for SURE that a particle is going to move in one way or the next. All you can say is that it is more likely to move in certain directions, but you cannot be certain. In fact, the more precise you make your predictions, the less certain you can be about those predictions. If you say an infinitesimal particle is definitely going to be at one particular position and one particular time, it is impossible to make a prediction about that particle's momentum with any certainty. In order to make a prediction about its momentum, you have to give up some certainty about its position.

In other words, before particles "pop into" (or, perhaps, "collapse into") existence (on observation, for example), their trajectories are drawn from a random distribution. It's as if "God" rolls "dice" before any particle is observed. The dice then chooses a random position and speed for the particle to assume and then goes on to roll again for another particle.

Einstein did not believe that God played "dice" with the universe. He did not believe that particles chose random trajectories. He knew that experiments backed up the assumption of randomness, but he insisted that quantum mechanics must be incomplete. He insisted that the randomness must not be random; it must be something that quantum mechanics is overlooking. In other words, he felt that the particles were being deterministic; however, the influences that were driving them this way or that were not yet known in the theory. However, we have much evidence (like Bell's Interconnectedness Theorem/Bell's Inequality) that says that such "incompleteness" objections are inconsistent with the reality that we observe. So, Einstein is probably "wrong" and "God" probably does "play dice" with the universe.

Some other answers have suggested that quantum mechanics purely approximates chaotic dynamics with probability distributions. This is not correct. Nature is fundamentally probabilistic. If it were fundamentally deterministic, we would observe certain things in different proportions than we actually do in nature.

Answer 4

Actually, a guy named Ian Stewart wrote a whole book about this quote by Einstein. Chaos theory had not been developed back in Einstein's day, and Einstein was troubled by the unpredictable nature of some physical phenomena - he felt a math equation should be able to predict the outcome, not just describe it with a probability distribution. So he made the comment about God not playing dice, apparently in a letter to Max Born.

"You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order."

Stewart's book says that actually math equations could predict the outcome, but that because it is a chaotic system, and because the initial conditions could never be known with enough certainty, that you are stuck using a probability distribution to describe the outcome.

Answer 5

Nothing that God does is just by chance, by the roll of the dice. He plans everything out for all of us. But it is up to us whether we follow His will for us or not.

Answer 6

It means that God knew exactly what he was doing.

The Universe and Physics in general is not some random phenomenon. They are exact and specific. We just don't have a total grasp of it all.

Answer 7

In quantum physics most happens by change.
Einstein did not believe it.
Einstein was wrong, because Israel was divided over the twelve tribes by change, so HE 'played dice'.

Th

Answer 8

I think he meant that probability didn't/wouldn't matter to God. With God there is only one outcome verses nature which has many factors.

Answer 9

It means that God doesn't gamble which is false as he did gamble and played Job like a fool with Satan.

Answer 10

It means, God does things the way it happens and it wasn't a guess.