Quote:
Originally posted by Kyo
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.
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Ah! The hidden variables approach!
Dodgy territory there my friend!
I'm still "agnostic" when it comes to this idea. But ultimately, I feel that it causes more problems than it fixes. It's a lot to give up, just to get away from a little bit of randomness! (Specifically it contradicts relativity, and in a much more
severe way than the "trivial" matter of wave function collapse)
But yeah, brownian motion looks random on the macro scale. It requires a deeper level of understanding exactly what constitutes a liquid to explain. That deeper level is atomic theory.
Quantum effects look random on the quantum scale...is this randomness just a consequence of a deeper reality?
Maybe.