Black holes and scientific determinism
Hello, I wrote this on 2016 based on one of Stephen Hawking’s lecture that opposed to Einstein’s statement “God does not play dice with the universe”.
The lecture is about whether we can predict the future, or whether it is arbitrary and random.
He started the lecture on the basis of scientific determinism, as stated by Laplace on the 19th century; “If at one time, we knew the position and speed of all the particles in the universe, then we could calculate their behaviour at any other time in the past or future”
However this statement is incorrect, Laplace’s paradox is the existence of radiation. If the statement is true then it would lose energy on radio waves, infra red, visible light, ultraviolet and gamma rays- enough to kill the entire human population from radiation alone. So Planck stated that radiation comes only in packets or quanta of a certain size.
In 1926 Heisenberg published his uncertainty principle;
Heisenberg uncertainty principle or indeterminacy principle, statement, articulated (1927) by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, that the position and the velocity of an object cannot both be measured exactly, at the same time, even in theory. The very concepts of exact position and exact velocity together, in fact, have no meaning in nature.
Einstein dislikes the quantum uncertainty theory. He felt that it was highly provisional, but that there was an underlying truth. This is also called the hidden variable theory, which seems to be the most obvious way to incorporate the uncertainty principle into physics. They form the basis mental picture of the universe held by many scientist and almost all philosophers of science. But these hidden variable theories, as experimented by John Bell, are incorrect as they give out inconsistent results with hidden variables.
Then Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Dirac proposed quantum mechanics. The quantum function contains all that one can know of the particle. If you know the wave function at one time, then it’s values at other times are determined by Schrodinger’s equation. Thus one still has a kind of determinism, but it’s not the kind that Laplace envisaged.
Then there is also the General theory of relativity: Space-time was curved and warped by the matter and energy in it.
The problem in quantum mechanics arise because gravity can warp time-space, that there can be regions we can’t observe. Quantum mechanics causes black holes to send out particles and radiation at a steady state. What we think of an empty space is not really empty, but it’s filled with particles and anti particles. They appear because of a field, such as the field that carry light and gravity can’t be exactly zero.
This means the value of the field would have both an exact position (at zero) and an exact speed or rate of change (also zero). This would be against the uncertainty principle, so all fields must have what are called vacuum fluctuations in terms of particle and anti particle. These pair of particles can occur for all varieties of elementary particles. They are called virtual particles because they exist even in the vacuum.
In the words of Hawking; The loss of particles and information down black holes meant that the particles that came out were random. One could calculate probabilities, but one could not make any definite predictions. Thus, the future of the universe is not completely determined by the laws of science, and its present state, as Laplace thought. God still has a few tricks up his sleeve.
