Quote:
Originally posted by CSflim
Determinism is dead.
Randomness is inherrent in the Quantum mechanical viewpoint.
If you take a radioactive atom, there is no law governing as to when it will decay. We can give it a statistical analysis, and declare that the average length of time that such an atom will decay is known (a.k.a. the half-life), so on the large scale we can usually predict things...we can describe evry acurately, the amount of readioation given off by a "lump" of radioactive material, but we cannot predict the activity of a single atom.
Couple this with chaos theory and our ability to predict the future is pretty damn pathetic! (The decay of a single atom in Tokyo could cause a hurricane in Florida?)
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You've missed the point of my post, then, though I will admit it is quite a stretch.
To rephrase: It is my belief that laws govern everything and we are simply ignorant of them due to our inability to perceive everything around us to absolute detail.
I'm aware of the case of radioactive decay, but I believe that there is some mechanism, unseen (and perhaps undetectable given our current equipment and methods), that determines the decay of a single atom.
Another way of putting it would be that because we aren't omniscient, we are forced to accept that, to our limited perceptions, some things may always be 'random,' even though, if we could perceive everything to absolute accuracy, we would see that there was some definite mechanism governing supposedly 'random' behavior. You can't tell me for sure that radioactive decay of a single atom is random. You can only tell me that so far as we know and can determine, radioactive decay of a single atom is random.