Does God play dice with the Universe?
If you are looking for a short answer, yes it seems to be god is playing dice with the universe. But why can’t ‘God’ decide anything? That’s a complicated story.
“God does not play dice with the universe.”
This famous statement by Albert Einstein led people to think that he believed in God and religion. Some people interpreted this as Einstein is rejecting the core concepts in physics. But in reality, this statement is an expression of how Einstein was unsatisfied with the explanation for quantum theory at that time.
The main characters of this story are Einstein and Bohr. The most brilliant minds at that time. But there was a little problem; in the beginning, Bohr refused to accept the theory of quanta even though his colleague and friend is the one who introduced it. But with the time Bohr came around. When he accepted it he started loving it a bit too much. Bohr modified and developed Quantum theory to an extent it almost made illogical. He came up with the famous Bohr model for the atomic structure which we still learn today in our school and for most of the explanations in university.
In the meantime, Einstein came up with his famous equation E=mc2 which suggested energy has particle properties and light can be considered as a particle or a wave. This gave a nice solution to an issue with Bohr’s model; how electrons ‘jump’ from one state to another. First scientists started to consider electrons as waves and eventually, they considered the possibility of considering all matter as a wave function. When scientists started doing that, weird stuff came out from math. the very existence of our universe proved to be based upon probabilities.
For example, Electrons can pass through a thin barrier just by disappearing from one side and appearing from the other side (this is highly improbable). And we can mathematically apply this to larger-scale objects, but again probability is going to decrease dramatically but will never reach zero.
Well, Einstein had a point. We just can’t leave everything to be probabilistic. This is like when God is creating the universe, he took a dice with infinite sides (infinite possible outcomes) and created an alternate universe for every possible outcome that came from the dice. This is why Einstein said god cannot be playing dice with the universe. There has to be an underlying reality, something is still missing from quantum theory to explain this weirdness.
“Spooky action at a distance”
Another concept in quantum mechanics that Einstein was hesitant to accept was quantum entanglement. Imagine there are two particles (with the same origin) in the universe far away from each other. Quantum mechanics suggests that an event that happens to one particle could affect the other particle instantaneously no matter how much separated they are. This situation is called quantum entanglement. Due to its’ illogicality and the fact that it had the potential to disapprove of Einstein’s theory of relativity (speed of light is the maximum speed we can send signals), Einstein went on to say this is ‘spooky’.
As you might have already guessed, this story does not end in Einstein’s favor. Eventually, the whole scientific community started accepting quantum theory with its uncertainty. In 2019 a group of scientists from the University of Glasgow actually managed to take a photo of quantum entanglement putting an end to all the debate and speculation about quantum theory.
If you read this story carefully you will realize the irony in it. When Einstein was young and he put forward the theory of relativity, celebrated scientists back then hesitated to accept Einstein’s theory. And now when Einstein is the most respected and celebrated scientist in the world, he is doing the same thing. He is refusing to accept new knowledge.
Does this make Einstein any less of a genius? Obviously no, Einstein is a synonym for the word ‘genius’. What we can learn is it’s okay to make mistakes. We should question things until we understand them. One day, if you lose your ability for imagination and if you feel like not questioning things around you, from that day onwards you have no purpose to live. You just exist because you cannot die. Einstein never lost his curiosity and power of imagination.
