'dice' or 'approximation', does it matter?

[phil henshaw]

I've been meaning to do some new digging on Einstein's enigmatic
complaint.    In a recent program on Channel 13 (I think, but I can't
locate it now) a recognized physicist portrayed Einstein as unable to
accept uncertainty in nature, and that view seems to be becoming one of
the prevalent understandings of the issue (see Wiki link below).   On
the face of it, since Einstein was a founder of statistical physics, it
seems unlikely.   "God doesn't roll dice", is about something else.
One of the things I finally found today to expose the deeper issue was
Niels Bohr's long, polite, emphatic last-word on the subject (Bohr
1949).   Bohr says that what Einstein objected to in QM was the
elimination of causality and continuity.

"Yet, a certain difference in attitude and outlook remained, since, with
his mastery for coordinating apparently contrasting experience without
abandoning continuity and causality, Einstein was perhaps more reluctant
to renounce such ideals than someone for whom renunciation in this
respect appeared to be the only way open to proceed with the immediate
task."

Curiously, the violations of theory or nature expected by both sides in
this long debate don't seem to have turned up in the many decades of
argument and experiment.   QM works fine, so apparently the bizarre way
in which QM treats physical events as occurring without taking any time
or involving any process, i.e. abstractly following rules in the
complete absence of any means for doing so, doesn't matter.    Both
Einstein's (impossible) and Bohr's (necessary) views on the matter seem
to have been simply wrong.

I guess my preference is the conservative approach.   If it doesn't
matter whether the disconnects of nature expressed by our best tool are
physical or informational, there's no need to argue about it (i.e.
within the 'shut up and calculate' school of thinking).    The matter is
far from settled, I realize, since provocative proofs like those of
Bell's hypothesis seem to support the idea that QM's weirdness is
physically real.  That real weirdness still appears to be entirely
contained, and to not violate causality and continuity anywhere other
that within QM, however.

Where I think it may ultimately matter is in encouraging the idea
generally that nature functions as a set of abstract rules without
processes, rather than through incompletely understood physical
processes which our rules approximate.   I think whether you interpret
nature is physical or informational on a macro scale probably matters a
lot.   The two models at least appear functionally different and need to
be looked at.    

The central problem I see with interpreting physical events as a
function of rules is that those rules need to either refer to definable
things, or to have a player.     I don't think either of those is
demonstrable as a generality, and the opposite is much more the usual
appearance of the problem.

Is there anywhere it would really matter, one way or another?


-------------
Niels Bohr 1949 Discussion with Einstein on epistemological problems in
atomic physics.  http://minerva.tau.ac.il/physics/bsc/3/3144/bohr.pdf

-------------
Wiki link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
"Einstein never rejected probabilistic techniques and thinking, in and
of themselves. Einstein himself was a great statistician, [19] using
statistical analysis in his works on Brownian motion and
photoelectricity and in papers published before 1905; Einstein had even
discovered Gibbs ensembles. According to the majority of physicists,
however, he believed that indeterminism constituted a criteria for
strong objection to a physical theory."

[Russell Standish]

On Sun, Aug 06, 2006 at 12:39:05PM -0400, phil henshaw wrote:

>
> I've been meaning to do some new digging on Einstein's enigmatic
> complaint.    In a recent program on Channel 13 (I think, but I can't
> locate it now) a recognized physicist portrayed Einstein as unable to
> accept uncertainty in nature, and that view seems to be becoming one of
> the prevalent understandings of the issue (see Wiki link below).   On
> the face of it, since Einstein was a founder of statistical physics, it
> seems unlikely.   "God doesn't roll dice", is about something else.
> One of the things I finally found today to expose the deeper issue was
> Niels Bohr's long, polite, emphatic last-word on the subject (Bohr
> 1949).   Bohr says that what Einstein objected to in QM was the
> elimination of causality and continuity.
>

I think's Einstein's reaction is symptomatic of a belief that there is
a totally objective point of view. In "Complexity and Emergence" I
argue that this belief gets in the way of understanding the notions of
complexity and emergence. The Quantum story is telling us the same
thing - that there is no observer independent point of view - at best
we have overlapping subjective points of view, and physics is about
characterising the the overlapping parts (I also take this as the
message of Vic Stenger's new book Comprehensible Cosmos, although Vic
himself is a little too old school for this interpretation).

Cheers

--
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is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a
virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this
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