Tal, a conversation with an alien (8 page)

He Does Not Play D
ice

So is this your power then? You can disappear and teleport?

Disappearing and teleporting aren't bad pow
ers per se. But they are nothing compared to what I can do. I see a much more interesting dimension than purely an extra spatial one. And now that you have gotten this limiting idea of not being able to conceive of extra dimensions out of your head, I will explain how you can understand this dimension, at least logically and then perhaps intuitively. Do you want to make some tea yet?

--
It looked like I was in this for the long haul, so I decided to follow his suggestion.  Luckily I have a gas stove so making tea was not a problem. He waited as I poured the water into the kettle and lit the burner with a match. I noticed the light in the room grow brighter as I fumbled around for the tea and sugar. He continued talking as I waited for the water to boil.

T
he concept of time as a dimension was proven with the help of mathematics and physical experiments just one hundred years ago. Interestingly the dimension I will explain to you was also proven by mathematics and experiments almost one hundred years ago. However, the results of these equations and experiments still needed to be interpreted correctly by humans.

You are
referring to the randomness described by quantum mechanics?

Yes, that is the
key. But let's start from the beginning. You mentioned quantum mechanics before, what do you know of it.

--I decided to show off.

Quantum Mechanics is the branch of Mathematical Physics that deals with the atomic and subatomic systems and their interaction with radiation in terms of observable quantities. The laws of quantum mechanics, unlike Isaac Newton's deterministic laws lead to a probabilistic description of nature. That is part of the definition from the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Well t
hat was pretty short and concise; what does it mean?

I would say the most
basic idea behind quantum mechanics is that the universe is not a gigantic predictable machine, as scientists believed for centuries before. Scientists had thought that if they could just unlock the secrets of the universe machine, they could understand and predict the actions of the universe, really figure out how it works.

Ye
s, the quest for The Theory of Everything. Continue.

Most s
cientists believed in a few key principles, one of the most basic being the law of cause and effect, or the causality principle, as the encyclopedia states it. If you knew everything about the forces acting on an object, you would know for certain what would happen to that object. You could repeat the experiment over and if the cause was identical the effect was always identical. Like adding two plus two always equals four. From these ideas came the unbreakable, predictable laws, like Sir Isaac Newton's three laws of motion. Using these laws Newton predicted the motion of just about everything, including planets. However, what experiments in the early 1900's showed was that while large objects we perceive behave in predictable ways, the things that make up those objects: atoms, electrons, protons etcetera, can act in strange ways. They can unpredictably disappear and reappear somewhere else without actually moving from place to place. They can also entangle and communicate instantly over large distances, faster than the speed of light. It seems illogical, but I know that quantum theory is the basis of almost all of our modern technology. Like semi conductors, computers, cell phones, fusion and fission.

Very thorough.
And you are right, much of modern technology requires the mastery of the very small micro world. Quantum theory describes this world. Hence it is critical in the understanding of fusion and fission, electricity, magnetism, just about everything. Most people are not familiar with the details of quantum mechanics because it is so strange and counter intuitive. Since you have read about it and seem to understand some of it, the most important aspect of it for you to try to comprehend right now is that particles can act unpredictably. In other words, the same exact cause can have many different results. A force can act on a molecule, but what happens next is not definite, and if you run the same experiment a few times, you will actually get different results. 

T
his lead to Einstein's famous objection that God does not play dice.

Yes
, Einstein was a life long opponent of quantum theory, even though his own experiments lead to its development. One of his main objections was that particles seem to act unpredictably. His belief however was that these particle dice rolls were not truly unpredictable, they just appear to be so. His belief was that there was an underlying law that would explain all of the randomness in the particle's motion. He spent the majority of his life searching for that law, searching for The Theory of Everything. One of the most important models of quantum theory that Einstein hoped to explain away was a theory at the heart of quantum mechanics, the Heisenburg uncertainty principle.

That is a well-known theory.
I think of that as one of the few understandable parts of quantum mechanics. It states that you cannot know the exact position and the exact momentum of a particle at the same time. The more you know about where something is, the less you know about where it is going, and vice versa. 

That
's correct. As you get more and more accurate measurement of a particles position, you actually lose accuracy in measuring its momentum, hence you cannot know both. Since you cannot know exactly both where it is and where it is going, you cannot predict with certainty where it will be in the next moment. If you could, there would be no randomness. 

Yes,
I am aware of much of this, though I can't say I know why it is so.

Q
uantum theory is such a grand and frankly confusing idea that philosophers, scientists, even mystics have spent the last one hundred years trying to interpret it. There is already more written about it than you can absorb in a lifetime. Still, now that you understand that time is a coordinate, just like space, I want you to think of uncertainty in the following way: You cannot predict with exact certainty, with information only from your current coordinate in space-time, what the exact form of any other coordinate in space-time will be. Now rationally this seems true for coordinates far from your current coordinate, say one hundred years into the future. You could not possibly predict with certainty what will happen in this apartment one hundred years from now. But there is still a belief that coordinates closer, say, one millisecond from now, you could know. If we just know the position of all the particles in this room, and their trajectories, we can predict, with one hundred percent certainty what will happen in this apartment in the next millisecond. Quantum theory explains that even for the shortest amount of time, this is impossible.

But it seems to me we can predict
with certainty what will happen to large objects, like cars or planets or baseballs. How is it that science is so certain of what will happen when in reality it is just a gamble, a roll of the dice?

Their certainty
is a simple matter of statistics. Let's say we have a six-sided die, and we throw it, there is no way for us to know which number will come up. We can make no accurate prediction. It will be any number 1 through 6. We know that there is an equal chance for any of these numbers coming up. However, already on the second roll, we can start to make predictions. We know that if you roll the dice two times, you will get a number between 2 and 12. But the chance of the results adding up to 2 or 12 after two dice rolls are much less than the chance of the results adding up to 7. To get 2, for instance, there is only one possibility: both dice land on 1. But to get 7 there are many possibilities, 1 and 6, 2 and 5, 3 and 4, 4 and 3, and so on. Now if you roll the dice one hundred times, we can make predictions that are even more accurate. We know that while possible, it is very, very unlikely for the dice total to be 100. That would require one hundred rolls of the dice all landing on 1. Similarly, it is also as unlikely to get a total of 600. All one hundred rolls landing on 6. They are not impossible results, just very unlikely. At the same time, it is very likely that the total after 100 rolls will be around 350. Large objects have billions of molecules. Thus after a billion rolls, you can make, relatively speaking, a very accurate prediction of the final number, though not the exact number. This is why an object made of billions of particles will end up acting predictably. This is also why casinos make so much money. The casino knows that it can lose; in fact it will lose quite often. It is impossible for the casino to know if it will win any specific hand of blackjack or spin of roulette. It does know however, that over the long term, with many millions of games played it will come out ahead. The odds, however slight, are in its favor. Hence in the macro world, things are often predictable, but quantum mechanical laws are always in effect. For instance, it is actually possible for me to walk through this wall, as all of my particles could tunnel through the wall simultaneously. Since there is a chance that one of my particles can do so, there is a chance they will all do so. I am made of billions and billions of particles, so the chance of all of these particles appearing on the other side together is extremely, extremely small, but again, not impossible.

I
s all this dice rolling really random? I mean, if we knew all the parameters of that dice throw; the wind, your exact muscle strength, the angle you throw the dice at, the softness of the table, can't we in fact know the exact number that will come up?  Isn't it more a lack of information than pure randomness?

L
ack of information can be perceived as randomness; the information is out there, but we simply do not have a way to gather enough of it to make a correct decision. This is actually the type of randomness most humans believe in. This is why in betting on sports or making decisions about the future, humans try to gather as much information as possible. They believe that the uncertainty comes from their lack of information. They believe that if they knew all the facts, there would be no randomness, the same thing would happen every single time. But in the micro world of quantum effects, there is no hidden knowledge, it is simply, physically impossible to know. All things around you are vibrating fields of probability. They only appear definite because you observe them on the macro scale.

I understand, but
you have still not explained the reason for the randomness. I suppose this is one of those “why” questions science has no answer to.

Actually, there are many
answers to this question. Philosophical, mystical and scientific. Without randomness, there would be no evolution, no life, and no variety. It is the random nature of the universe that manifests the variety in your world. As living beings, we are children of this process and are naturally attracted to it. We find it, beautiful. Dynamic changing systems are attractive to life. Think of the most beautiful and varied places on your planet, they are often the most dynamic, teeming with life, change and flow. These things bring variety and interest. The frozen tundra or empty desert is not usually the most popular vacation spot. If everything behaved in the same fashion, without variety, your universe would be very different.

Couldn't these changes be guided and not r
andom, say controlled by a God? He could have some master plan, but we wouldn't necessarily know it because it appears random.

You are right, and on a theological
level, the quantum mechanical model gives God a different role than in traditional religions. In a non-random, deterministic universe, God controls all changes and all events. In a randomly generated universe, God could create a framework of initial laws, and then let the universe unfold without needing to actually micro manage the system. The inherent randomness will continue to generate an infinite amount of interesting variations. In essence, God, the Universe, Mother Nature, whatever you call it, changes from a puppet master to an observer. 

Is God even necessary then?
I know that many scientists have claimed he is not. After all, who needs an observer?

It is only natural
, don't you think, that the high priests of a scientific paradigm that prides itself on understanding the world without faith or belief, would at some point come to that conclusion? 

--He had finished his bottle of juice
, took another and continued.

D
o you know the ancient Greek story of Icarus?

Yes, his fa
ther attached wings to his body in an attempt to escape from the island of Crete. He flew higher and higher, ignoring his father's warning not to fly too high. He flew too close to the sun. The heat melted his wings off, and he fell to his death.

It is an interesting story that
is often told to warn people of the penalty of over confidence or hubris. One interpretation of the story could be that Icarus used technology to fly. When he did so, he flew too close to the heavens.  As he flew higher and higher, the Sun melted his technology, and he died. In a sense, an inherently random universe acts like the Sun, protecting the knowledge of the gods. Remember that not too long ago, scientists believed that if they had the proper tools and technology, they would know the position and speed of any single particle. If they just knew all the facts, they could know exactly, with one hundred percent certainty where it would be in the next moment.