Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Albert Einstein, despite being a founder of quantum mechanics, never liked the theory. One particular aspect of it rankled him. But first, some context. Since Newton, physics had been exact. F = ma. No ambiguity. As more and more laws were discovered with similar exactitude, people became convinced that the universe worked like clockwork. Precise laws governed everything.   Quantum mechanics overturned the clockwork universe. By stating that uncertainty is inherent to nature. Not because we don’t know enough details. Not because our measurement systems have limitations. But because that is just how nature is. (At the tiniest of tiniest levels . At the bigger levels we experience, Newtonian physics still rules). Einstein hated this uncertainty-is-inherent-to-nature idea, and it is captured in his famous line: “God does not play dice.” He felt that  natural laws could not possibly be like the throw of dice, with its inherent randomness and probabilities.   In...

Richard Feynman is an extremely quotable guy; and not just about scientific stuff. In fact, it’s almost impossible to read any popular science book of the past few decades without finding at least one quote by him. And each book will have a different quote that’s apt to their topic! It’s easy to see why: the man can articulate things superbly. I like Mario Livio’s books and blogs, and I was reminded of Feynman’s statements on the topic discussed in two of Livio’s blogs. Livio’s first blog was on uncertainty and its relation to religion, science and philosophy. From a world where most religions assumed that “everything worth knowing has already been written, either in the scriptures, or in the legacies of very wise men of the past”, we entered the scientific era where we accept that “there are many questions to which we don't know the answers, and that all answers are only provisional”. In this uncertainty-is-normal world we live in, Livio quotes Bertrand Russell about t...