- #1
HJ Farnsworth
- 128
- 1
Greetings,
Most of the people I know are not scientific, so they'll often ask me random questions about scientific subjects. One of the questions I get a lot is for a general overview of what quantum mechanics is. What I usually want to communicate to them is that it's a probabilistic theory, and that that's one of the things that are incredibly weird about it, since pretty much all of human instinct says that a theory should be deterministic (of course, some of the interpretations say that there should be a deeper theory that is deterministic, but this is outside of QM as it currently stands, so is besides the point).
Now, here's the problem I keep running into when explaining this to people: when I first heard about the concept of determinism, it was completely obvious to me what it must mean (namely, that given all of the information about a system at one point in time, a determinstic theory will give all of the information about the system for all points in time). It's also very easy for me to see why it's so counterintuitive that our current theory would not be deterministic, since it's counterintuitive to me and, indeed, it took me a long time to allow myself to accept that aspect of QM. However, it's hard for me to explain the concept to people who haven't thought about it before and don't know what it is, and it's even harder for me to explain why a non-deterministic theory is so counterintuitive - it's just so inherently clear to me that it's hard for me to break down and explain.
So my question is: does anyone have a good explanation (analogy, whatever) for the layman of what determinism is, and why it seems "obvious" that a theory should be deterministic, making QM counterintuitive?
-HJ Farnsworth
Most of the people I know are not scientific, so they'll often ask me random questions about scientific subjects. One of the questions I get a lot is for a general overview of what quantum mechanics is. What I usually want to communicate to them is that it's a probabilistic theory, and that that's one of the things that are incredibly weird about it, since pretty much all of human instinct says that a theory should be deterministic (of course, some of the interpretations say that there should be a deeper theory that is deterministic, but this is outside of QM as it currently stands, so is besides the point).
Now, here's the problem I keep running into when explaining this to people: when I first heard about the concept of determinism, it was completely obvious to me what it must mean (namely, that given all of the information about a system at one point in time, a determinstic theory will give all of the information about the system for all points in time). It's also very easy for me to see why it's so counterintuitive that our current theory would not be deterministic, since it's counterintuitive to me and, indeed, it took me a long time to allow myself to accept that aspect of QM. However, it's hard for me to explain the concept to people who haven't thought about it before and don't know what it is, and it's even harder for me to explain why a non-deterministic theory is so counterintuitive - it's just so inherently clear to me that it's hard for me to break down and explain.
So my question is: does anyone have a good explanation (analogy, whatever) for the layman of what determinism is, and why it seems "obvious" that a theory should be deterministic, making QM counterintuitive?
-HJ Farnsworth
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