So, you’re a determinist? Well, if that’s your starting point, fine.
But you’re going to have a rough time convincing everybody we should begin with a deterministic universe as our starting assumption. There’s considerable debate about it, especially when you toss quantum mechanics into the mix.
And it would have been nice to know your assumptions to begin with, determinism being a real biggee.
That, combined with your references to the “branching” of universes is confusing.
Worse, even if you claim otherwise, all your talk of “assigning” probabilities to represent our lack of knowledge of the universe is then complete bunk. If the universe is truly deterministic, assigning probabilities at all is a worthless, pointless task. If we accept the universe is deterministic, we’re arbitrarily assigning values we know are not true to serve some unforeseeable purpose.
Seriously? Your posts have been barely coherent. They’ve gotten better, but deciphering them is a pain, and we made some reasonable guesses about your intent based on them. If we guessed wrong, it’s not entirely (or even mostly) our fault.
determinist yes you got me.
the thread wasnt about that atall .but it wound its way there.
fusing
I was pointing what i thought Mijin in this thread is Everything Inevitable if Time is Infinite?
was getting at.I will assume its on sub atomic level because i dont know of any other place random events happen.
If you have a particle going along, (doing anything) its stops and at this point there are 2 possibilitys (as far as this idea goes whether this is true on not is what i am talking about) one it could fly to the right the other left.each way makes a different history and once its gone the one way the other history is not goner happen finished over.
So this particle has stopped and it has physical laws that Govern itS behavior,so we should be able to predict whether it turns left or right (meaning there isnt really 2 possibility or history’s),however it does something we never seen it do before, it turns NEARLY right .this is not what we predicted
now what has happened here has a random act happened or is it we just dont have the cause,s or facts ,enough to know it wasnt randomness.
What has happened, thousands of runs in particle acceleraters or somehow they have tested the same experiment and found that certain particles sometimes doing one thing say 60% of the time 20% something else and 20% something else.
They have done it so many times they have statisticAL probability’s about its behavoiur.
the question here is this random or not.
If anyone can tell me how this random act happened .
if the act has a cause. It is not random if you dont agree with this then plaese explain why.
also you could of told me that if you highlight a word and right click its a spell checker .duh
In my opinion (and this seems to be pretty much the prevailing opinion in physics) such things as radioactive decay of atoms is random. That nice Uranium atom might decay now…or later.
As you noted, given large numbers of such atoms, we can see very clear statistical patterns. The “half life” can be measured with remarkable accuracy.
But for any given atom… It’s random.
Suppose it were otherwise. Suppose the time that the atom was going to decay was somehow fixed. How? Where is that information stored? What kind of “timer” or “fuse” is used to keep track of the time? Such a mechanism would have to be vastly complex, and made up of many parts. It would have to be as complicated as a stopwatch.
To date, no Uranium atom has ever been shown to be different from any other (yes, yes, within the same isotope.) The atom that decays now is no different from the atom that decays 100 years from now.
Without a good working model for such a deterministic system, the “random” explanation seems superior. It might be exploded tomorrow, but until then, random it is.
So you need to differentiate between statistical probabilities and random events. The probabilities only apply to future events; past events either happened or they didn’t - you can’t apply probabilities to them.
That’s a function of your browser, not this website.
As I noted above, I think it is valid, in some ways, to look at events as classes. An insurance adjuster, for instance, could meaningfully say that a particular accident, which did happen (and thus has a “probability” of 100%) was actually very unusual, and that, if the same situation were repeated a thousand times, the accident might only occur the way it did once or twice.
Yes, definitely it is wrong in the formal sense. But it isn’t entirely meaningless; it does have explanatory value. You could ask, “What was the probability of Jesus being crucified?” or “What was the probability of John F. Kennedy being elected president?” You can meaningfully asses how many things had to happen in specific ways, and construct at least ballpark estimates of the likelihood.
Idont See this as huge barrier yet.but a barrier yes.
What is your position on this
WE have 1 Uranium. atom and it decays in first hour3 times at 20min,30min,34mins
second hour 2 times at 10min,50min
third hour 5 times
Right and so on.now run this for 100 years you might see it start again at the beginning.so it becomes predictable.is this being over looked or what is the answer.
Also do you agree that to have the random decay, if its true,it must not have any cause or reason to it ,none,nothing.It will simply decay for no reason atall.
Dude, you have a very serious communication problem. I do not comprehend your first question at all. One atom of Uranium decays only once. After that, it is a different element (or at least a different isotope.) It’s a “different atom.”
To your second question, yeah, pretty much. If it is random, that means there isn’t a specific reason. Atomic decay isn’t “caused.” It just happens. It might happen in the next ten seconds…or the next hundred years. You can’t predict it, and no one has ever found any measurable difference between atoms that is associated with the time that passes before decay.