I figured that photon could help me out with this, but perhaps there are other scientific geniuses who can resolve my cluelessness.
I have a better grasp of biology than I do physics, but I generally love science, so I try to pay attention. Recently I watched the NOVA documentary
The Elegant Universe, and last week one of the professors delivered a lecture in a religions class in which I am involved in about "creation". the lecture specifically pointed to the order and "design" in a mechanistic world for discerning purpose and arguing for a clear model of divine origin and sustenance. In the course of the lecture, I couldn't help but reflect upon the very limited bits of what I have learned regarding frontiers in physics and quantum theory, and how the scientific descriptions of randomness, matters of uncertain probability and chance at the sub-atomic level actually contradict much of what the lecturer was trying to convey. I wrote about it in a discussion forum that I moderate for the students, and received this response from one:
Quote:
"I would hesitate to say that the world is chaos; while it is obviously more complicated than a microscopic assembly line, there is significant order even at the quantum scale. (Or to be more precise, the sub-nanometer scale)
For example, prior to observation a given electron has no definite position, rather it has a distribution over an area such that the sum of the probability of it being in each given 'spot' adds to exactly 100%. In other words, it is guaranteed to exist. The problem is a conflation of physics and epistemology - it would actually be -wrong- to say that it is in one particular spot but we are simply ignorant of which spot it is, since we have experimental data to show that this is not the case. However once we act to measure the exact position of the particle "the probability distribution collapses" and it does have one distinct location.
A problem (yet unresolved, I believe) inherent in what I have written is my treatment of location. So far I have used a classic treatment of spacetime and it may be that at small enough scales distance is quantized such as to cause a "snap to grid" effect (although in reality there would be no space in between the grid points.)"
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My rudimentary grasp of physics in conjunction with his incredibly dense style of writing (he's a philosophy major) have left me scratching my head. I need some help interpreting exactly what he is trying to say, but furthermore, I also need to know:
What do scientists mean when they describe the universe as random and chaotic? What does the above student mean when he says that there is "significant order" at the quantum scale?