Wednesday, February 28, 2007

A Matter of Probability...

When we drill down into the subatomic world, where quantum theory has its most dramatic implications, uncertainty reigns. At that scale, it is difficult to describe particles as things, but more as probabilities. Science cannot say with certainty where a particle will be. What it can do is predict the odds the particle will exist in various places in what ends up being a probability pattern or wave.

We can look back to the words of noted atomic physicist, Robert Oppenheimer...

"If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether the electron's position changes with time, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say 'no'."

J.R.Oppenheimer, Science and the Common Understanding (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), pp. 42-43

This inability to predict exactly how a particle will behave gives rise to the common misconception that its nature is random. In physics, this unpredictableness is associated with the complementary nature of specific properties as spelled out in Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

An extension of this may well be the polar nature of quantum awareness and quantum presence as I have laid out... with free will being implicated in the unpredictableness.

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