View Single Post
  #17  
Old 02-13-2007, 09:38 PM
ChrisV ChrisV is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Adelaide, Australia
Posts: 5,104
Default Re: I\'m and Atheist and Believe in Predeterminism: Prove Me Wrong

[ QUOTE ]
That being said, lets imagine some omnipotent being. It would know the location of every particle of matter in the Universe and all the forces acting on each particle. Now, if that were true, it should be able to predict where each and every particle would go into infinity. For example, if you know the position of a ball and the forces acting on it, you can predict its trajectory to infinity.

[/ QUOTE ]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

[ QUOTE ]
In classical physics, it was believed that if one knew the initial state of a system with infinite precision, one could predict the behavior of the system infinitely far into the future. According to quantum mechanics, however, there is a fundamental limit on the ability to make such predictions, because of the inability to collect the initial data with unlimited precision.... Until the discovery of quantum physics, it was thought that the only source of uncertainty in a measurement was the limited precision of the measuring tool. It is now understood that no treatment of any scientific subject, experiment, or measurement is accurate until the probability distribution for the measurement is specified.

The uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics is sometimes erroneously explained by claiming that the measurement of position necessarily disturbs a particle's momentum. Heisenberg himself may have initially offered explanations which suggested this view. That this disturbance does not describe the essence of the uncertainty principle in current theory has been demonstrated above. The fundamentally non-classical characteristics of the uncertainty measurements in quantum mechanics were clarified by the EPR paradox which arose from Einstein attempting to show flaws in quantum measurements that used the uncertainty principle. Instead of succeeding in showing that uncertainty was flawed, Einstein guided researchers to examine more closely what uncertainty measurements meant, which led to a more refined understanding of uncertainty. Prior to the publication of the EPR paper in 1935, a measurement was often visualized as a physical disturbance inflicted directly on the measured system, being sometimes illustrated as a thought experiment called Heisenberg's microscope. For instance, when measuring the position of an electron, one imagines shining a light on it, thus disturbing the electron and producing the quantum mechanical uncertainties in its position. Such explanations, which are still encountered in popular expositions of quantum mechanics, are debunked by the EPR paradox, which shows that a "measurement" can be performed on a particle without disturbing it directly, by performing a measurement on a distant entangled particle.

[/ QUOTE ]
Reply With Quote