I am having a hard time grasping why Einstein says " I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice". How does the idea that events are goverened by probabilities mean that God plays dice? I am not seeing how you can say just because events are based on probability, that God didnt design it that way. This is not meant as a discussion about religion or God but merely the reason why Einstein said that quote. I think it is fairly obvious that we are not seeing the entire picture in regards to photons and electrons since they do not “know”, but rather that we have not developed a very good explanation.
IANA physicist, nor a scholar of the same. But this is what I think. Niels Bohr championed probability in quantum physics. Einstein believed that ‘probability’ only needed certain mathematical equations with which to turn them into certainties. So Bohr was saying that something would probably happen, but didn’t necessarily have to. Like rolling dice, as it were. Einstein thus said, ‘God does not play dice.’
Bohr retorted, ‘Stop telling God what to do.’
Again, this is not something I really know about. I may be in error. But that’s how I took it.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/docs/god_dice.html
My understanding was that Einstein was unconfortable with the implication that since things like electrons were governed by probability theory, and one could not know their position with any certainty. Einstein could not accept that this was a fact of nature that also applied to God; surely an omniscient God would know the position of an electron? Surely microscopic events could not be so random and unpredictable an omniscient God would share our ignorance?
Einstein was probably uncomfortable with the concept of wavefunctions of elementary particles. It states that there’s a probability there’s a (for example) electron here, but not that the electron is actually here.
To get a better grasp of what Einstein was talking about, read about Schrodinger’s Cat. Schrodinger said that if you put a cat in a box such that the cat had a 1/2 probability of living, that until you opened up the box, the cat would actually be in a 0.5Alive + 0.5Dead state. The cat is neither alive nor dead, but a 50% mix of either.
Things like that probably irked Einstein, for obvious reasons.
The biggest misunderstanding people have about this is that it’s not that the position of an electron is expressed as a probability, but that it’s position IS the probability function. It has no further position other than the probability. It’s not there’s a 25% chance that it’s at position X and 53% chance that it’s a position Y. That’s the probabilities that it will be observed there - the actual electron is a little bit everywhere, according to the probability function. That’s the essence of it’s being, not some sort of a problem with the theory, equipment or the model.
A favorite of mine: Cecil on Schrodinger’s Cat.
The bit about God was just Einstein being poetic – belief in God didn’t have anything to do with Einstein’s objections. (In fact, Einstein himself denied that he believed in a personal God on more than one occasion.) Einstein believed the universe should be deterministic – basically, he thought that if you know everything about the state of a closed system at some particular time, and you perfectly understand physics, you ought to be able to say with certainty what the state of the system will be at any future time. It turns out the world doesn’t work like that. (Einstein also had some other specific objections to quantum mechanics. See, for instance, this article on the EPR paradox)
OMG, that’s wonderful, thank you for the link! Those verses deserve a Pulitzer Prize.
In an article by Isaac Asimov, he stated that Einstein was uncomfortable with quantum mechanics, probabilities, the work of Heisenberg, Schrödinger, etc. Einstein wanted to believe in a Universe whereby everything could be known to the minutest degree. Asimov concluded this essay by saying “… and physics went on without him”. (ouch !!!)
Isn’t there an old expression, “yesterday’s radical is tomorrow’s conserative” ?
I think the full quote is important, for an understanding of Einstein’s views. From memory:
The first part is as important as the second. The “no dice” bit means that if you have all of the information, you can completely predict the system. The bit about dealing the cards where they cannot be seen, however, speaks to whether you can ever get all of the information. From all I’ve read, Einstein accepted the notion that it was impossible (even in principle) to know both a particle’s position and momentum at the same time. The question, then, is does a particle even have a position and momentum, albeit an unknowable one? Einstein maintained that yes, even if we couldn’t determine them, the position and momentum both existed.
Bell’s inequality and associated experiments eventually showed that at least some part of Einstein’s ideas were wrong, though there’s still some room for interpretation as to which parts were wrong. Yes, it’s possible for Einstein to be wrong.
God doesn’t play dice with the universe, :wally
I loved this one, myself, back when I read it in the first compilation book.
Yah! That’s when Cecil was the ORIGINAL Cecil. Man, now those were the days. Brilliant thinker and writer, and sarcastic bastard to boot. Some fun. xo, C.
It’s not ‘no dice’ but doesn’t ‘play’ dice, which could mean that He has accounted for all possiable outcomes.
apologize for the hijack,
did einstein say “the more i studied the universe the more i began to believe in a higher power”
if so, could someone give me a source so i can see the exact wording…
ive searched and had no luck…
thanks
There are probably two exact quotes that give rise to the common short form :
(using Wikiquote, but the first one matches the way I recall it)
“Die Quantenmechanik ist sehr Achtung gebietend. Aber eine innere Stimme sagt mir, dass das noch nicht der wahre Jakob ist. Die Theorie liefert viel, aber dem Geheimnis des Alten bringt sie uns kaum näher. Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, dass der Alte nicht würfelt.” - in einem Brief an Max Born, 1926
“Es scheint hart, dem Herrgott in seine Karten zu gucken. Aber dass er würfelt und sich »telepathischer« Mittel bedient (wie es ihm von der gegenwärtigen Quantentheorie zugemutet wird) kann ich keinen Augenblick glauben.” - in einem Brief an Cornelius Lánczos, 1942
Very quick translations :
“Quantum mechanics is worth paying attention to. But my inner voice tells me that it’s not the ‘true Jacob’[=‘real McCoy’]. The theory supplies us with much, but does not bring us any closer to the secrets of the Almighty[sup]*[/sup]. In any case I am convinced, that He does not gamble.”
“It appears difficult to get a look at God’s cards. But I cannot believe for an instant that he gambles and uses telepathic methods (as the present Quantum theory would have it).”
[sup]*[/sup]lit. ‘the Ancient One’ or more fig. ‘lord’, but ‘lord’ is associated with biblical usage for the proper name of God. The second quote uses the more formal ‘Lord God’
It’s the first quote - from a letter dated 4th December 1926 - that’s usually taken as the source of “God does not play dice”; it’s rendered in English in The Born-Einstein Letters (Walker, 1971, p91) as:
One can no doubt argue about the nuances, but the German-English dictionary I have immediately to hand has “würfeln” as “to play dice” (obviously from “wurf” for “throw”), so the meaning appears that bit more specific than “gamble”.
But it’s true that the metaphor is reused in later letters by him. For example, there’s a 1944 one to Born where he states “You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists” and describes quantum mechanics as a “dice-game”.
SBS television in Australia has been running a series of documentaries about Einstein since November. The first was Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony.
As the SBS program guide describes it:
In those final hours of his life, while fading in and out of consciousness, he was working on what he hoped would be his greatest work of all. It was a project of monumental complexity and that he hoped would unlock the mind of God. But as he lay dying in the Princeton Hospital he must have understood that these were secrets that God was clearly keen to hang on to. The greatest scientist of his age died knowing that he had become isolated from the scientific community; revered on the one hand and ridiculed for this quest on the other.
The BBC site for the original program on Horizon has this:
God does not play dice
Einstein’s work was underpinned by the idea that the laws of physics were an expression of the divine. This belief led him to think that everything could be described by simple, elegant mathematics and moreover, that once you knew these laws you could describe the universe with absolute accuracy. Einstein loathed the implications of quantum mechanics. It was a clash of ideologies.
The conflict reached a crescendo in the late 1920s at the Solvay Conference in Belgium. There Einstein clashed with the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr over the nature of the universe. Einstein constantly challenged Bohr over the implications of quantum mechanics, but never budged from his belief that “God does not play dice”, meaning that nothing would be left to chance in the universe. To which the quantum mechanics community replied: “Einstein, stop telling God what to do with his dice.”