Quote:
Originally Posted by Bring_Back_Shantz
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that any description of quantum mechanics that you get from someone posting on a message board is going to be simplistic and abstact at best, and at worst complete hooey. (that's right I used hooey, don't judge me).
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Totally agree with this
I don't pretend to understand all the math behind this stuff, and unless you've got the math chops for quantum stuff I don't think it's possible to talk about it with much authority. At least authority beyond regurgitating what others have said.
It gets difficult too because in what you gave the student wrote Textcritic the first question that pops into mind is "what's order" and "what's chaos."
In the context of the lecture (sermon?) about order and design, I think deterministic is maybe a better word.. things appear deterministic and on a macro scale they are for the most part, but at a quantum level things aren't deterministic. Something like what Bell's Theorem says.
So what the student wrote, I'm not quite sure the point he's making either.
At the quantum scale there is "order", in that things occur according to the laws of the universe as they exist (our incomplete understanding notwithstanding). Then he goes on to talk about a probability cloud for the position of an electron and when you measure it the wave function collapses (which is just one interpretation of QM). So I think he's making the point that that is still "order". That we can't accurately predict the exact location (or even know certain pairs of attributes) of the electron doesn't represent chaos (meaning anything can happen?), just isn't deterministic.
So I think when scientists say the universe is random and chaotic, I think they mean that outcomes can't always be predicted. In a radioactive sample I don't know which atoms are going to decay, but I know how many will decay over a specific period of time.