Fortune-telling and Fate _ Fortune-telling Fatalism

Does fate really exist? Why does even Einstein think that "everything is arranged"?

Einstein has always had a saying: everything is arranged. If we check the information carefully, we will find that Einstein didn't actually say that this sentence was actually imposed on Einstein by others.

Objectively speaking, however, Einstein's worldview coincides with this sentence. Einstein once wrote a letter to Bohr, in which Einstein wrote:

You believe in God who rolls dice, and I believe in perfect law and order.

The "God" here does not mean the "God" in our usual sense. Einstein was a staunch atheist, and "God" here refers to the ultimate theory. Einstein's "complete law and order" is actually similar to "everything is arranged". So what is going on?

Determinism begins with Newton, who is regarded as the founder of classical physics. The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy published by him can be said to be the starting point of classical physics and laid a scientific paradigm. Before Newton, people never thought of describing the world with a theory, and they could accurately predict various physical phenomena. But Newton's mechanics and the law of gravity did it, refreshing people's three views at that time.

Newton's theory has subtly changed people since then. In this theory, it seems that all movements in the world can be determined by certain laws. As long as we can master this law, we can know the process and result of exercise. Therefore, some scholars were inspired by Newton's theory. They believe that the world we live in is like a machine, instructions are laws, and the world will develop according to the whole law. This idea was later called: mechanism or Newton's mechanical worldview.

There was once a mathematician named Laplace who pushed mechanism (or we can also say determinism) to the peak. By deepening Newton's theory, he wrote a book: Celestial Mechanics. He also dedicated the book to Napoleon. Napoleon asked him after reading the book: Why is there no God in this book? Laplace said, I don't need the existence of God in this book.

Laplace also put forward the famous scientific hypothesis "Laplace demon" to explain the mechanism. Laplace said:

We can regard the present state of the universe as the result of the past and the cause of the future. If a wise man (Laplacian demon) knows all the forces of natural motion and the positions of all objects at a certain moment, assuming that the wise man analyzes these data, everything in the universe, even the smallest particles, can be reduced to a simple formula. So for this wise man, everything is clear, and he can know all the movements in the universe at any time.

To put it bluntly, Laplace is a wise man. He knows the ultimate law of the universe, and then he knows the current motion state and position of all particles, so he can foresee the operation of the whole universe. Under this belief, everything in the universe is arranged.

Einstein: God doesn't roll dice. Although this is only a scientific hypothesis, it has deeply influenced many people. Today, many scientists still have this belief. In other words, they think that all natural phenomena can be described by theory and there is an ultimate law to describe everything. We can't do it now because we haven't found the ultimate law yet.

Einstein supported the view that the world is orderly and can be described by complete laws. But at the beginning of the 20th century, from Planck's "light quantum hypothesis" to the establishment of the theoretical building of quantum mechanics. Einstein was caught off guard. In the process of establishing quantum mechanics, Einstein made great contributions, and he can be regarded as one of the founders of quantum mechanics.

Unexpectedly, Einstein later stood on the opposite side of quantum mechanics, and then Schrodinger and De Broglie were both founders of quantum mechanics. Then why did quantum mechanics turn so many great scientists against water?

This is because quantum mechanics destroys the mechanism. There is an uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, which tells us that electrons outside the nucleus cannot measure the momentum or position of electrons at the same time. If you want to measure the position accurately, momentum can't be measured, and neither can position.

The reason for this result is that the state of electrons is different from that of objects in the macro world. Electrons are actually in the form of probability clouds and appear everywhere in the nucleus at the same time. We know the probability that they appear in a certain position, and when we observe it, its position becomes unique.

This probabilistic explanation was unacceptable to Einstein, so he said in the debate with Bohr: God does not roll dice. So Einstein actually thinks that everything is arranged, and all arrangements are the ultimate law, which is also called the grand unified theory in physics. Einstein devoted his life to this, but unfortunately there was no breakthrough.