Sunday 17 October 2010

More from Quantum

"Consider a million identical radioactive nuclei that are unstable and will, sooner or later, spontaneously 'decay' by emitting a particle and changing into a more stable form. While quantum mechanics enables us to calculate something called the half-life (the time after which half of the nucleus will have decayed)it cannot tell us when any particular nucleus will decay. [...] We can calculate the probability that a nucleus will have decayed after any given time, but the fact that we cannot do any better that this is not due to our ignorance.[...] What we are lacking is a deeper understanding of Nature whereby we are able to predict exactly when any given nucleus might decay, just a fuller knowledge of all the forces involved in a toss of a coin would allow us to predict its outcome."

This is an example of quantum mechanics. This implies that although theoretically, if we knew everything about the conditions of the atom, we could predict when it would decay, it is impossible for us to actually know the conditions. It could then be argued that randomness does exist.

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