Split from: I'm reading "The God Delusion" - a review in progress

[Belz...]

I'm not sure what you are getting at. There was once a time when people thought that if you just knew all the initial conditions, you could know the state of the universe for all time, by projecting forward from the known starting point.

Assuming quantum fluctuations have no real effect, that would be true.

Now, the consensus is that this is not the case. The quantum fluctuations are indeed enough to make macro-level changes. For example, the quantum fluctuations are indeed enough to make that dinosaur-killing asteroid miss, or to make another one hit.

Source ? So far all the stuff I've seen says otherwise.

Of course, the quantum fluctuations within the asteroid are not enough to make it miss, but when the asteroid was gathering itself from miscellaneous iron molecules and other elements ejected from stars, it would have formed differently, and billions of years later, it would have been in a different place. So, that very significant asteroid was indeed, in every sense, a random event.

Well that would take a whole load of pretty much non-random fluctuations for that to accumulate, wouldn't it ?

At least, that's the consensus of the scientific world today. Perhaps some future discovery will refute that view, and we will learn that God does not play with dice after all. For the moment, the money is on the view that he does.

My money's on the view that he doesn't exist.

 

[Meadmaker]

Source ? So far all the stuff I've seen says otherwise.

I'll see what I can find.

My money's on the view that he doesn't exist.

Well, yes, but I was of course quoting Einstein, and talking about Einstein's God, i.e. nature.

 

[steenkh]

Whoops! I said that Einstein was a deist. That was wrong: Einstein was a pantheist. I am sorry if I have caused any confusion.

 

[Meadmaker]

Source ? So far all the stuff I've seen says otherwise.

I accidentally answered this in the "other thread" on evolution and randomness.

So, if anyone has read this twice, sorry.

I looked up the whole asteroid question. I can say a couple of things with certainty. (No random numbers here.)

1. Way back in non-linear dynamics class, I remember in the explanation of chaotic dynamics that the professor said that even if you knew the initial position of a chaotic system (his example was the break of a set of billiard balls) to the limit imposed by the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, you wouldn't be able to predict where the billiard balls would end up. I infer that quantum variation is enough to result in macroscopically observable differences.

2. The prevailing theory of why the universe is nonuniform, with galaxies, galaxy clusters, etc, involves quantum fluctuations during the expansion phase immediately following the big bang. I infer that if quantum fluctuations can move a galaxy, they can move an asteroid.

I'm fairly certain that cosmologists and astronomers would disagree with you. Once the properties of the asteroid were know, it could be accurately predicted.

But the asteroid didn't start out as an asteroid. It started out as hydrogen atoms, that fused to helium atoms, that eventually became iron and other atoms, that attached to each other as dust, that gradually accumulated into pebbles, that stuck together into a really big rock. I'm fairly certain that somewhere along the line, something happened that might have resulted in that asteroid being a few meters away from where it was, and after a few billion years in orbit, that few meters could grow to a few thousand kilometers, and that would be enough to make it miss, at least on that particular orbit.