Is random a valid scientific cause?

phyzguy

Whether or not everything has a cause is not a question of logic, but an empirical question to be decided by observation and experiment. You statement is like my saying that "logic says that if I'm walking forward at 10 miles/hour and I throw a ball forward at 10 miles/hour, the ball will be going at 20 miles/hour." You may think that's what logic says, but experiment says otherwise.

Maui

Randomness is an assumption even in quantum physics, the OP is right about that.

Maui

No, it's not falsifiable. This thread belongs to philosophy.

wuliheron

It got thrown out of the philosophy message board, I assume for being so much rambling gibberish.

russ_watters

To whatever scientific accuracy applies, yes we have.

russ_watters

You are incorrect. The absence of a pattern is just as falsifiable as the existence of one.

DragonPetter

Here is what I was getting at originally. To be a truly random event would imply the process has an equal probabilitly for an outcome for all possible outcomes. My point was that we are still talking about probability distribution, even if we have a special name for a flat one across all possible events called "random".

That is why I think his presumption is false. He is presuming that randomness is a fundamental property from QM, but that would be equivalent to saying "the probability density being flat across all possible events is a fundamental role in reality". That's where I think the presumption is inaccurate. He is describing a special case as fundamental to reality.

russ_watters

Most (all?) randoms in science are issues of probability, yes.

For having both elements, are you familiar with the mathematical concept of superposition? Have you ever done any programming?

DragonPetter

Yes to both. See, the decay of an atom being called a random process implies a specific variable is isolated and, when all other things are ignored, that variable has a random PDF. Implying that isolated consideration is fundamental to reality, or a fundamental property of the universe, is where I think he has gotten into trouble. If you take those special cases, and apply it as fundamental to reality (randomness is only a special case of a more fundamental concept of probability), then superposition is moot, and that is why I said his presumption is wrong.

Maui

The foundations of science are philosophy, hence your statement that you have observed "no pattern behavior"(that you might presume was not deterministic) is not a scientific one, but philosophical. If random is as you define it - "no pattern" then we have never seen randomness because you'd need an expermental evidence that doesn't exist(only philosophical)

skippy1729

The foundation of science is experiment.

1. You can never prove that a sequence of decays occur at random time intervals since it would require examination of an unbounded sequence of numbers.

2. You might disprove randomness by detecting a hitherto unnoticed pattern or causality.

Science consists of theories that can be disproven (but haven't yet been).

alan2

Interesting replies. I am content with the notion that everything is deterministic and randomness is a tool. Roll a die or flip a coin. If I knew every piece of information about its initial position and trajectory, the material that it was made of, the surface on which it landed, the weather, etc., I could spend the rest of my life calculating which face would land up. I can't do that so I use the mathematical tool of probability which works quite well. Thermodynamics is deterministic (we use both molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations) and there are many people who think that the quantum world is also. We use mathematical tools all the time to solve things that we are either unable to solve or don't fully understand, such as perturbation theory in non-linear systems. I see randomness as another tool to help understanding and predictive ability.

rasp

Would the following statement be considered correct?
All effects have causes, some known others unknown, but in the QM world, the causes are not only unknown (except as probability functions) but are also unknowable because they have no discernable past space/time paths. The causes in QM are therefore labeled random.

Maui

No. The experiment is a tool, not foundations. The foundations are a set of axioms and assumptions that are considered self-evident for establishing a testable theory. Self-evident doesn't necessarily mean correct.



Your examination cannot give a clue if a process is truly random or deterministic. It could simply be random looking(self-evident as in the example above).




And if you don't detect a pattern, is it random or just of unknown cause?

Maui

Yes. However it makes little sense to say that reality is truly random, as there are(as someone already pointed out) many constraints acting on the possible outcomes.

rasp

M Quack, I think you misundertand the enormity of the odds in equating the origion of life to winning the lottery. Of course, unlikely events happen in finite space time. I also admit that whatever can happen, will happen in infinite time. However, it is my understanding that the mechanisms required to start life on earth are so unlikely to have come together in a finite universe as to be mathematically indistinguisable from impossible. It is therefore absurd to think a prior that it would happen "by itself". However, it did happen, but posterior the Anthropic principle, which is more a description of several unlikely events is small comfort as an explanatory tool.

phyzguy

I disagree. Nobody understands the origin of life well enough to be able to calculate the odds.