Einstein said, "God can't roll dice." What's he trying to say?
Einstein quipped in his reply to German physicist Max Born on 1926. At that time, quantum mechanics was still a brand-new theory. Born believes that its core is randomness and uncertainty, just like human arrhythmia. Before the emergence of quantum theory, the theory of classical mechanics was often certain. If there is such a role, there will be such a result. However, after the birth of new quantum mechanics, when matter acts like this, it can only be said that it is possible to get such a corresponding result. And in some cases, this action may lead to another result.
Einstein expressed strong opposition to this. He insisted that God would not play dice with the universe handed down from generation to generation. The phrase "God can't roll the dice" has almost become Einstein's unique business card, as well as his mass-energy equation (E = mc2). What is the significance of Einstein's saying this? What does he think of God?
Einstein's parents-Herman and Pauline Einstein-are not German Jews who strictly abide by Jewish rules. However, although his parents were secularists, Albert Jr., who was only nine years old, believed in Judaism with great enthusiasm and became a devout and dogmatic Jew for a long time. According to Jewish custom, his parents invited a poor scholar to dinner at home every week, and it was this extremely poor Polish medical student Max Talmud who changed the boy's life trajectory and made mathematics and science shine into Albert's life for the first time. At that time, Einstein was only 10 years old, with strong plasticity and unlimited possibilities in the future.
So he finished reading 2 1 volume Aaron Bernstein's People's Book of Natural Science. Later, Talmud turned the steering wheel and took him to read Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Soon, Albert was immersed in david hume's philosophical theory. Beginning with Hume, Einstein was quickly attracted by ernst mach, an Austrian-Czech physicist, psychologist and philosopher. Mach devoted his life to the research of experimental physics. He believed that "seeing is believing", so he completely abandoned metaphysics, criticized Newton's concepts of absolute time and absolute space, and refused to admit the existence of atoms.
However, this journey of knowledge mercilessly put Einstein Jr. under the conflict between science and faith. Einstein/kloc-rebellion at the age of 0/2. He hated the dogma of religious organizations and never got rid of it all his life. Later, this disgust continued to extend, and he began to oppose all authoritarianism, including various dogmatic atheism.
Einstein 14 years old
As a child, Einstein was influenced by a lot of empirical philosophy (such as Hume, as opposed to Kant who insisted on rationalism), which benefited him a lot in the next 14 years. Mach's criticism of absolute space-time greatly inspired Einstein, who founded the special theory of relativity (and its symbolic mass-energy equation E =mc? ) had a significant impact, when Einstein worked as a technical examiner in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. Ten years later, Einstein constructed the general theory of relativity, which completely subverted our understanding of time and space-gravity is caused by the geometric effect distortion of time and space bending. However, with the growth of age and wisdom, Einstein stood on the opposite side of Mach and put his experimental physics theory on the shelf. In 1922, he even publicly criticized: "Mach is a brilliant mechanic, but he is a poor philosopher."
As time went on, Einstein's position gradually approached realism. He will accept the content of scientific theory more realistically and regard it as an accidental and "real" representation of objective physical reality. At the same time, although he didn't want to get involved in religion, he still had a sense of trust in God because of the influence of Judaism in his childhood, which was the basis of his own philosophical theory. When asked about his realistic position, Einstein replied: "I haven't found a better word than (religious) to express our trust in the rational nature of reality."
However, it is worth noting that Einstein believed that God should be understood philosophically, not religiously. Many years later, Herbert Goldstein, a Jewish rabbi in new york, sent a telegram to Einstein, saying that he was willing to pay him to answer the question "Do you believe in God" within 50 words, while Einstein's reply only used 32 words: "I believe in Spinoza's God, because the harmony and order of all existing materials show his existence, but I don't believe in the God who dedicated himself to the fate and life of mankind." Baruch de Spinoza was contemporary with isaac newton and gottfried leibniz. In his philosophical system, "entity", "nature" and "God" are equivalent, which is why Spinoza was regarded as a dangerous heretic and even expelled from the Jewish church in Amsterdam.
Einstein didn't believe in a personified God. God in his eyes is infinitely superior, invisible, subtle but harmless. He is also a firm "God decider". In Einstein's view, God's "harmony and order" can be reflected in the whole universe. Under the construction of God, the universe is completely dominated by the result of causality. In this way, the space left by Einstein for his philosophy of free will was squeezed out: "All the results are caused by some previous reason. Whether it is the beginning or the end, everything is decided by forces beyond our control ... An invisible musician plays a mysterious tune in the distance, and people, plants or cosmic dust are dancing to it."
Special sense and general relativity provide us with a brand-new concept of time and space and the benign interaction between time, space, matter and energy. These theories are completely consistent with Einstein's argument that "God exists and exists in the harmony and order of matter". However, the new theory of quantum mechanics does the opposite. Einstein himself did his part when 1905 was founded. Quantum mechanics studies the motion and radiation of matter at the atomic and molecular levels, subverting the original view of time and space.
As early as 1926, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger put forward "wave mechanics", which completely changed the concept in a rather vague way. Schrodinger himself prefers to explain his theory in a more realistic way, and so does the description of "wave function". However, under the impetus of Danish physicist niels bohr and German physicist Werner Heisenberg, the academic circles have gradually reached the understanding that the explanation of quantum theory should not only stay at the literal level of theory.
In essence, Bohr and Heisenberg believed that science at that time encountered a conceptual problem in the process of describing reality, which philosophers have been warning people for centuries. Bohr once said: "there is no quantum world, only an abstract description of quantum mechanics;" It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to understand nature. Physics is concerned with our view of nature. "Heisenberg fully understands the uncertainty of the quantum world, and his views also echo Bohr's positivism declaration:" What we observe is not the nature itself, but the part exposed by the way we ask questions.
The classical anti-realism "Copenhagen interpretation" of these physicists-denying the reality of wave function and thinking that observation will lead to the collapse of wave function-soon became a mainstream trend of thought in quantum mechanics. Later, a group of physicists who opposed positivism, taking David Bohm as an example, put forward a new mechanism, thinking that wave function is a kind of "code" of human experience, and it also contains our subjective beliefs and values derived from these physical experiences, so that we can learn information from past experiences, thus expanding potential possibilities and predicting the future.
This statement is far from Einstein's philosophy, and he can never accept the explanation that the function used to describe the state of microscopic systems-wave function-is not "real"; He can't accept that his god can allow "all existing substances are orderly" to completely crack at the atomic level, leaving only lawless uncertainty; In this case, even if the cause is known, it is completely impossible to accurately predict the consequences.
Bohr and Einstein therefore launched a lot of confrontation on the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and this period also triggered numerous waves and debates, which can be described as a bright moment in the whole history of science. This is not only a conflict between two physical theories, but also a conflict between two philosophies, and a conflict between two metaphysical preconceptions about the nature of reality and its scientific interpretation. This argument started with 1927. Although both sides have passed away, the debate they left behind is still full of vitality and remains an unsolved mystery.
If Einstein were alive today, he might not be surprised to see this endless debate. 1954 February, just before his death 14 months, Einstein wrote in a letter to American physicist David Bohm: "If God created the universe, then his greatest concern must not be how to make us understand the world more easily."