The people have spoken and our next blog book club title will be Quantum Physics and Theology by John Polkinghorne. In it, Polkinghorne explores how the process of science has similarities to the process of theology and the ways that studying science can benefit theological inquiry. It is not a book about whether science proves God, but rather about how we learn about the physical world through science can inform how we learn about God through theology. As such, I believe it will be accessible even if you aren’t familiar with quantum physics, as it does not delve too deeply into the technical details.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: Rebooting Quantum Physics
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Science in Review: Quantum Foam Fluctuation, Roll for Initiative
I’ve always been sympathetic to Einstein’s famous assertion “God doesn’t play dice with the world.” In my public health training, I regularly and fruitfully used statistics and probability theory. Ideologically, they struck me as concessions to pragmatism. Human beings are too complex, their measurable attributes innumerable; we cannot know enough about them to accurately describe their full condition at any moment. We appeal to the law of large numbers to save us from our finitude. Somewhere behind those statistics are objective truths about the health of each individual in the public. As with people, so with photons; underneath those probability waves, surely there must be a bedrock of certainty.
When I read about this result in Big Bang cosmology, I was intrigued. I discovered that an interpretation of quantum physics with certainty at its core does exist, and has existed for some time. It was never widely adopted, and has become less popular in recent years. This new cosmological result resurrects it, or at least its central and most controversial element — a guiding equation that makes the properties of a single particle dependent on every other particle in the universe. This results in nonlocal effects which are considered irreconcilable with the locality of other physical phenomena. Â It also gives each particle a definite location and velocity. The probability wave still limits how precisely those quantities can be measured, meaning this version of quantum physics gives all the same results as fundamentally probabilistic interpretations.
Having been intrigued, I began to wonder. Why am I so opposed to a fundamentally probabilistic reality? [Read more…] about Science in Review: Quantum Foam Fluctuation, Roll for Initiative