archetypal fool

I feel that I can clear up a few question flowing around this thread. I believe that the double-slit experiment , among its many interestingly insights, pretty much shows that the universe is random. Not too long ago, scientists were able to perform the double-slit experiment one photon at a time. During the experiment, located within a vacuum, a single photon was shot at a material which would register the impact though a screen with two slits. All the variables were exactly the same, and yet, every shot hit a random place. When the experiment was done, the familiar banded pattern was present. You can do this experiment many times, and yet you'll probably never get the same results (i.e, the first photon you shoot will almost never hit the same region the first photon hit last time you did the experiment, neither will the second, etc...), which basically slaps the face of conventional deterministic science.

Quantum physics says that you can't define any particle as an "object" the way we're familiar with them. Photons aren't "flying around" everywhere; your TV isn't "shooting" electrons at the screen. It's some pretty crazy shit, but until the photon or electron is required to exist (e.g, when it impinges itself in your TV, or when a photon reaches your eye, etc...) it doesn't. Before a photon hits your eyes, it exists as a wave of probability, not a sphere the way we imagine them, and the same applies to the electrons, and through correlation, protons and all matter. And as for the Heisenberg principle, it works like this: We can't measure the momentum or location of a particle not because we don't have the technological ability to do so, but because if the probability wave for the photon exists, and you attempt to measure the momentum or the location, you create a "need" for the particle to exist so that you can measure the property. Because of this, it has to "pop" into existence, then turn back into a new probability wave. You basically alter the original properties of the wave. There's no way to get by this, because you can't measure somethings which doesn't exist. Therefor, since matter exhibits wave properties, you can't predict exactly where it will hit, but you come up with a probability spread, and we're all familiar with the way probability works. You know that if you flip a coin, you have 1/2 chance that it will come up heads, yet you can throw it and get 5 tails in a row. There is randomness in probability, and since wave properties are defined by probability, there is randomness in the way matter behaves at the subatomic level. Like I said before, it's crazy, but if you read "Nature Loves to Hide" by Malin, it will hopefully make much more sense.

While these affects are only on the subatomic scales, all of the universe we see exists because of the interactions at these scales, so the tendency for randomness exhibited in subatomic interactions are, always have, and will always be affecting us in some way, even if we don't perceive them.