“God does not play dice.” Who is Einstein's God?

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Einstein wrote in (December 1926) "The theory - that is, quantum mechanics - has many benefits, but it does not bring us any closer to the mystery of God. I am absolutely certain that God does not play dice."

Einstein wrote this in response to a letter from German physicist Max Born.

Max was saying that the heart of the new theory of quantum mechanics beats with uncertainty and randomness, as if it were suffering from an arrhythmia.

When physics before quantum theory was that if we enter input A we get output B, quantum mechanics seemed that if we put input A we get output B with some probability, and in some cases we can get exit C.

Einstein did not accept this, and in the following decades it echoed his insistence that God does not play dice with the universe, something as difficult to understand as his equation E = mc2.

What did Einstein mean when he said that?

How was Einstein's perception of God?

His parents, Hermann and Pauline, were non-religious Ashkenazi Jews.

Despite the secularism of his parents, Einstein became acquainted with Judaism and adhered to it with considerable enthusiasm when he was nine years old, and for a period of his life he remained a committed and religious Jew.

According to Jewish custom, weekly his parents would invite a poor student to their dinner table.

It was a destitute medical student Max Talmud (later called Max Talmy) who introduced the young, impressionable Einstein to mathematics and science.

He studied all twenty-one volumes of Aaron Bernstein's Popular Books on Natural Science (1880).

Examined all twenty-one volumes of Aaron Bernstein's Encyclopedia, "The Famous Books of the Natural Sciences"

Max Talmud then guided him to Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781), after which he moved on to the philosophy of David Hume.

From Hume, Einstein turned to the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, whose empirical philosophy that belief can only stem from observation required a complete denial of metaphysics, and with it any ideas of absolute time and space, and the existence of atoms.

However, this intellectual journey has harshly revealed the conflict between science and the religious text.

Einstein rebelled in his twelfth year.

A great aversion to the dogmatism of institutional religion was rooted in him;

It is an aversion that remained with him throughout his life, and extended to all kinds of authoritarianism, including any kind of dogmatic atheism.

Einstein has benefited after 14 years of his childhood that immersed in experimental philosophy.

Ernst Mach's absolute rejection of time and space helped give rise to Einstein's theory of special relativity (including the famous equation E = mc2), which he formulated in 1905 while working as a "third-rate technical assistant" at the Swiss patent office in Bern.

Ten years later (from formulating the equation), Einstein would complete our change in our perception of space and time with his formulation of the general theory of relativity, in which the curvature of space-time replaced the force of gravity.

But as he got older (and wise), Einstein rejected the empiricism of Ernst Mach, even saying that "Mach's mechanics are only matched by his poor philosophy."

Einstein, over time, developed a more realistic view.

He preferred to accept the content of the scientific theory from a realistic perspective, as it is a supposedly “correct” representation of an objective material reality.

Although he did not want any attachment to religion, his belief in God, which was rooted in him from his brief period of Judaism, became the basis on which he built his philosophy.

When he was asked about the basis of his realistic position, he said: "I see no good in the term 'religious' to describe this confidence in the rational nature of reality and in the possibility of its exploration - at least in part - by human reasoning."

However, God - in Einstein's view - was a philosophical, not a religious, god;

When asked several years later whether he believed in God, he replied, "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the legal harmony of beings, not in a God who is preoccupied with the destinies and actions of men."

Baruch Spinoza, who was a contemporary of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, conceived of God as being one and the same.

That is why his contemporaries saw him as a dangerous heretic, and the Jewish community in Amsterdam declared him an infidel.

God - according to Einstein - is greater than everything, but he is impersonal and intangible, cunning but not evil.

It is also highly imperative.

Einstein believed that God's "lawful harmony" arose in the universe from a strict adherence to the physical principles of cause and effect.

Therefore, there is no room in Einstein's philosophy for free will, as he says: "Everything is predetermined; the beginning as well as the end, determined by a force over which we have no control... We all dance to a mysterious tune, played by an invisible player in the distance."

The special and general theories of relativity provided a radically different new way of conceptualizing time and space and their active interaction with matter and energy.

These two theories are perfectly consistent with the "lawful harmony" established by Einstein's God.

However, the new theory of quantum mechanics, which Einstein also helped establish in 1905, had a different opinion.

Quantum mechanics is based on interactions involving matter and radiation, at the level of atoms and molecules, against a negative background of time and space.

In 1926, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger radically changed the theory by making its "wave functions" somewhat obscure.

Schrödinger himself preferred to interpret these wave functions realistically, as a description of a "physical wave".

However, a consensus that the new quantum imaging should not be taken literally was growing, with strong support and propaganda from Danish physicist Niels Bohr and German physicist Werner Heisenberg.

Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (networking sites)

In a sense, Bohr and Heisenberg were arguing that science had finally solved the conceptual problems in the description of reality that philosophers had been warning about for centuries.

"There is no quantum world," says Bohr. "There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It would be wrong to think that the goal of physics is to discover how nature became the way it is. Physics is about what we can say about nature."

Heisenberg has been repeating the following (and vaguely positive) statement: "We must remember that what we observe is not nature itself, but nature as it appears according to the methods of our investigative method."

Their unrealistic approach, or the "Copenhagen Interpretation" (which denies that the wave function expresses the true physical state of a quantum system) soon became the dominant way of conceptualizing quantum mechanics.

Newer forms of this unrealistic interpretation suggest that the wave function is simply a way of "encoding" our experience with physics, or our subjective beliefs derived from that experience, allowing us to use what we've learned in the past to predict the future.

However, this is not at all consistent with Einstein's philosophy.

Einstein could not accept an explanation that said that the main topic of the new quantum description - the wave function - was not "real".

He could not accept that his God would allow "lawful harmony" to completely disintegrate at the level of the atom, bringing with it chaotic inevitability and persistent doubt, with consequences and effects that cannot be categorically, unambiguously predicted, based on its causes.

Thus, the scientific arena was ready to engage in one of the most important debates in the history of science;

Einstein and Bohr are faced with an argument about the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

It was a clash between two philosophies, between two contradictory doctrines in the metaphysical conceptions of the nature of reality and what we can expect from the scientific portrayal of this.

The debate began in 1927, and although its heroes are no longer with us today, it is still alive.

It has not yet been decided.

I don't think Einstein would have been surprised by this.

In February 1954, just fourteen months before his death, he wrote in a letter to the American physicist David Bohm: “If God created the world, I am sure that his first priority was not to make it easy for us to understand.”

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This report is translated from: Aeon and does not necessarily represent the site of Medan.