From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Wed Mar 17 2004 - 20:33:17 MST
[Uisge Beata]
Einstein was wrong indeed but he was talking about the unsertenty and spontainious nature of quantum mecanics. He realy did'nt like it becouse of the same reason most of rational people don't like the answer:"becous" to the question:" why" In quantum mecanics a particle does not need a reason to do something like splitting it selve. This also iritates me abouth this theory, it makes it somehow not complete as a theory. Though im no specialist at al in this field, being a molecular microbiology student I do know something about it becouse of the obvious links with molecular orbitals in biological importand mollecules.
...
I myselve understand how live could have started but what i don't understand is why a particle yust moving a cross space suddenly kan be two different particles and some more energy and that this can happen completely without any interaction with other particles. Einstein had a feeling which he did not want to ignore even though he could see no alternative to it....
does anybody know if the string theory explains anything about all of this?
[rhinoceros]
If your question is whether String Theory can predict the time that a radioactive material will emit a particle, no, it can't. String Theory is an elegant attempt to unify most of what we already know and hopefully more, and perhaps to offer a more intuitive mathematical explanation of our inability to make such a prediction.
Einstein was not satisfied at all with quantum physics as a theory, because he felt that it violated either locality or causality. Here is another quote, besides the famous "dice" quote.
(Einstein, 1951): "What does not satisfy me, from the standpoint of principle, is its attitude toward what seems to me to be the programmatic aim of all physics: the complete description of any (individual) real situation (as it supposedly exists irrespective of any act of observation or substantiation)."
Neils Bohr expressed a different view:
Bohr (1934): "In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of phenomena but only to track down as far as possible relations between the multifold aspects of our experience.
Others pushed Bohr's view to the extremes:
Wigner (1961): "The laws of quantum mechanics cannot be
formulated ... without recourse to the concept of consciousness."
According to Bohr, we can only handle the quantum phenomena by using the perceptual (and scientific) framework which we have evolved for dealing with macroscopic phenomena (I couldn't track down the exact quote... I'll post it when I do.) What does it mean in practice?
It means that the only way we have to handle the quantum phenomena is to think in terms of particles, waves, the position and momentum pair, or the energy and time pair. We don't have any other way to put questions to Nature. But we realized that these quantities don't behave as expected in the quantum world -- they follow a probabilistic pattern.
Yes, but... what is the position and the momentum of a particle, Einstein would ask. I think that if small green people lived in the quantum microcosm they would answer him: "What do you mean by 'particle'? What is position and what is momentum?"
Actually, we have found a kind of causality in the quantum world. Not a causality of position and momentum, but a causality of the quantum equation itself. What happens when we ask for the position of a particle? We design an experiment which essentially forces the wavefunction into a special state, a "position eigenstate". This state gives us a particle and its position. In fact we pried out a position just because we needed one. If we needed an exact value for energy we would design an experiment to measure energy, and that experiment would force the wavefunction into a different state, an "energy eigenstate".
IMHO, the gibberish about the role of consciousness in quantum phenomena can be identified with our resolve to measure a familiar to us macroscopic quantity... after creating it.
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