Does randomness exist in nature?"

[cladking]

When you talk about conditions becoming sufficiently robust to make an outcome inevitable, is this the same as saying that predictions can be made when there is sufficient data available?

Yes, but I also mean that things (big things) in the here and now are often very predictable. If a car goes off a bridge you can predict it will hit the water and even predict the "exact" spot with sufficient information. When a hurricane is hurtling at high speed toward a city being driven by prevailing conditions it will become a virtual certainty it will hit it. But we still can't say which butterfly in China caused it. If we observe a butterfly in China flap its wings we can't predict what city will be hit two weeks later. We can't predict which car will go off the bridge until very shortly before it goes off. And, of course, we'll rarely have time to plot its trajectory until after the fact making prediction irrelevant.

With lots of data many things become predictable but then you still won't know the exact damage caused by a hurricane or if the car will hit a cargo carrier instead of the water.

In which case, isn’t apparent randomness actually an illusion caused by insufficient data?

Even when something is successfully predicted like the car hitting the water there are still an infinity (actually a very huge number) of possibilities of details. It's possible in many cases that none of the details is important before or during the fact but these details still drive the future. If the car splashes water on a pier it's an insignificant detail but if it splashes water on baby Einstein drowning him while watching the car it is of extreme importance in the future. But even the exact configuration of the splash will determine where hurricanes strike beginning in two weeks and lasting forever.

Seen from this perspective "randomness" is always real and so is "predetermination". The cargo ship that got hit was just in the "wrong place at the wrong time" in our perspective of an analog reality but it was wholly determined and predetermined from the perspective of small scale events and long timelines; unpredictable but inevitable. What happens in the here and now was determined by everything that happened a fraction of a moment ago everywhere.

So everything is determined, if only we have sufficient information to understand how?

No doubt some things can be determined with a probability of very very close to 100%. But no computer model can or will be able to determine the paths of hurricanes by computing the wing beats of every butterfly in China. The programmer won't believe his model is any good within only two weeks.

Hence long range predictions are better: Less accurate but the programmer won't have to explain the deviation.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Yes, but I also mean that things (big things) in the here and now are often very predictable. If a car goes off a bridge you can predict it will hit the water and even predict the "exact" spot with sufficient information. When a hurricane is hurtling at high speed toward a city being driven by prevailing conditions it will become a virtual certainty it will hit it. But we still can't say which butterfly in China caused it. If we observe a butterfly in China flap its wings we can't predict what city will be hit two weeks later. We can't predict which car will go off the bridge until very shortly before it goes off. And, of course, we'll rarely have time to plot its trajectory until after the fact making prediction irrelevant.

With lots of data many things become predictable but then you still won't know the exact damage caused by a hurricane or if the car will hit a cargo carrier instead of the water.



Even when something is successfully predicted like the car hitting the water there are still an infinity (actually a very huge number) of possibilities of details. It's possible in many cases that none of the details is important before or during the fact but these details still drive the future. If the car splashes water on a pier it's an insignificant detail but if it splashes water on baby Einstein drowning him while watching the car it is of extreme importance in the future. But even the exact configuration of the splash will determine where hurricanes strike beginning in two weeks and lasting forever.

Seen from this perspective "randomness" is always real and so is "predetermination". The cargo ship that got hit was just in the "wrong place at the wrong time" in our perspective of an analog reality but it was wholly determined and predetermined from the perspective of small scale events and long timelines; unpredictable but inevitable. What happens in the here and now was determined by everything that happened a fraction of a moment ago everywhere.



No doubt some things can be determined with a probability of very very close to 100%. But no computer model can or will be able to determine the paths of hurricanes by computing the wing beats of every butterfly in China. The programmer won't believe his model is any good within only two weeks.

Hence long range predictions are better: Less accurate but the programmer won't have to explain the deviation.

So a particular event may be inevitable, but not necessarily predictable? That makes sense. And everything in the universe is connected, which means that the web of causality is so infinitely complex, that it’s impossible to unravel; it’s not simply that a butterfly flaps it’s wings in Peru, it’s all the butterflies in the world, all the bees and sparrows and radio waves and solar winds, interfering with each other’s wave patterns, that causes the hurricane.

So however much information, and processing power, we may have at our disposal, we have to be selective about what we can predict. As for inevitability, which is not the same as predictability, perhaps it is an abstraction of limited significance in our world, even if it is intrinsic to objective reality. Whatever that is.

 

[Ponder This]

I admit when the idea for this thread titled, "does randomness exist in nature?"
came up i thought it would be easy just to trawl the internet for a few examples of seemingly random events in nature such as the radioactive decay of certain elements.

Then the question naturally arises, how do we know an event is truly random, or conversely, how do we know an event is truly predetermined?

I did some hasty googling and realised I might be a bit over my head on the second question, so I'm hoping some of our more knowledgeable members will chime in, but what I vaguely gathered is that you would have to have an infinite sample size to determine if something was truly random or predetermined, since even seeming patterns still have a chance of being the outcome of a random event.

Thoughts?

You've realized the first problem with so-called randomness.

 

[cladking]

So a particular event may be inevitable, but not necessarily predictable? That makes sense. And everything in the universe is connected, which means that the web of causality is so infinitely complex, that it’s impossible to unravel; it’s not simply that a butterfly flaps it’s wings in Peru, it’s all the butterflies in the world, all the bees and sparrows and radio waves and solar winds, interfering with each other’s wave patterns, that causes the hurricane.

So however much information, and processing power, we may have at our disposal, we have to be selective about what we can predict. As for inevitability, which is not the same as predictability, perhaps it is an abstraction of limited significance in our world, even if it is intrinsic to objective reality. Whatever that is.

I couldn't have said it better or as well.

I believe "reality" is what consciousness all strives to understand and modern humans use abstractions and analog language to accomplish it. We use reason and experiment. Animals have a natural connection to reality itself but see very very little of it.

But just as it's impossible to predict it is equally impossible to project backward. This isn't to say the "big bang" isn't real merely that nothing specific can be predicted through the knowledge it occurred. We can't predict the long term effects of the background radiation.

What happens must happen but it will never be predictable with 100% accuracy while most things can't be predicted at all due to incomplete knowledge, unknown or unquantifiable variables, and the chaotic nature of reality.

I believe this is formatting of reality itself.

 

[idea]

isn’t apparent randomness actually an illusion caused by insufficient data?

Bingo.

Interesting, for those getting into AI, machine learning, deep learning, neural networks....no more laws of physics, it's all just data analysis.

 

[HonestJoe]

Fun fact: Schrödinger's Cat was intended as a satire and mockery of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics.

But because so many people aren't aware of that, it now exists as both satire and not satire at the same time.

 

[Clara Tea]

I admit when the idea for this thread titled, "does randomness exist in nature?"
came up i thought it would be easy just to trawl the internet for a few examples of seemingly random events in nature such as the radioactive decay of certain elements.

Then the question naturally arises, how do we know an event is truly random, or conversely, how do we know an event is truly predetermined?

I did some hasty googling and realised I might be a bit over my head on the second question, so I'm hoping some of our more knowledgeable members will chime in, but what I vaguely gathered is that you would have to have an infinite sample size to determine if something was truly random or predetermined, since even seeming patterns still have a chance of being the outcome of a random event.

Thoughts?

Randomness test - Wikipedia

According to Wikipedia (above), the Diehard Battery of Tests is used to determine randomness.

According to Wikipedia (above), the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox caused "statistically independent" to be added to the requirement of the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle (which derives from the Robertson Shaw Inequality). Einstein, et al, proposed that a particle of spin 1 might randomly split into two particles whose spins add up to 1. So, though the top is random, and the bottom is random, the top plus bottom always equals one. So, you can use only tops of particles or bottoms of particles, but if you mix them, some will be statistically dependent and ruin the results of the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle.

Quantum mechanics deals with random complex numbers (complex numbers have real and imaginary parts). The wave function (also called the state function because it determines the state of a particle) of an electron is imaginary. Probability is the product of the wave function and its complex conjugate (this is how complex numbers are squared). Thus, the product of two imaginary wave functions creates a probability (of finding the particle in a particular place in space) real. To reiterate, from imaginary wave functions, we get a real probability.

To do quantum mechanics math, we convert the dimensions that we know (x,y,z,time) to dimensions in probability space (called Hilbert Space). Oddly, the probabilities also have dimensions. Also, oddly, the dimensions of space in the real world don't correspond to the dimensions of Hilbert Space.

A simple electron orbiting a single proton produces a Hamiltonian operator (an energy operator which is like a matrix but filled with math operations, and some are complex numbers) that is infinite columns by infinite rows. This is because each probability density corresponds to a unique position of the electron, and, as it orbits, it can be located in an infinite number of places.

Since calculating an infinite operator is too difficult, Schroedinger's Equation substitutes the Hamiltonian operator for its eigenvalue (that's one of many values that solves the Hamiltonian operator). This makes the math much simpler.

Physicists have a shortcut notation for probabilities called Dirak notation. It uses two probability densities. The front one is a < bracket called a bra, and the back one is a > bracket called a ket....together, they form a bracket. Variables in the bra and ket can be interchanged by taking the complex conjugate transpose. But, like matrix math, the order of the variables must be preserved.

Quantum mechanics is used to understand the small world (molecules and smaller). But, when applied to the larger world, the random numbers combine in such a way as to make things non-random. Thus, in the big world of Newtonian physics, random motions is sometimes converted to non-random motion.

Some data has both random and nonrandom elements.

grainy pixelated picture - Google Search

The link above shows grainy pixilated pictures. That is, pictures that have huge square chunks to represent the average values of color in the region.

Pixilated pictures have low frequency noise. So, they can be cleaned up, somewhat by a filter. But, to really be effective, dither has to be used. Dither is random noise that is added to a signal, then the picture is fixed by averaging the dithered signal. Surprisingly, a dithered signal brings out the original picture, in surprising detail. Even details that are not captured in the pixils come out.

Dithering doesn't affect the signals. According to Fourier's theorem, any periodic wave can be split into harmonic components. Thus, a square wave can be represented by an infinite series of sine waves. All sine waves have PDFs (probability density functions) that go to infinity on the endpoints, and are rather low in the middle. As a result, dithering doesn't affect the sine waves, so it doesn't affect the entire signal. For digitally sampled signals, Fourier requires two samples per sine wave (that is, at twice the frequency of the components of the signal).

Dithering (which is noise added to the signal) drops the noise level of signals because the PDF (Probability Density Function) of the dither convolves (a mathematical process) with the PDF of the noise. The process of convolution causes the noise to be spread throughout the frequency spectrum and that lowers the noise of the signal. Noise outside of the band of interest is then filtered out (for examples, noises too low pitched to hear or too high pitched to hear), which removes the noise entirely that used to be in the signal band.

Dither can be used to reverse the effects of quantization and effects of jitter (caused by timing delays, for example, those in a computer as numbers are calculated). The PDF of quantization has a characteristic staircase pattern.

Large scale dither has to be subtracted out at the end.

FINDING RANDOM NOISE IN NATURE:

Clouds are random, yet they still form patterns, so there is some non-randomness in them. Rushing water is somewhat random, though there are some effects that are not. For example Q in fluid dynamics is the flow rate = velocity times the cross sectional area must remain constant. Sometimes, at the bottom of water falls and spillways, the water, leaps higher (called hydraulic jump), caused by disruptions in laminar flow.

Thermodynamics is filled with random events. The mean free path determines how often one air molecule bumps into another (and that is defined as temperature).

Yet, there are laws and boundaries that define thermodynamics. For example, there is the Ideal Gas Law, which relates temperature, pressure, and volume. Saturated steam tables show the amount of water vapor, steam, and air at given temperatures and pressures.

As I was getting degrees and advanced degrees in physics, and various types of engineering, I realized that there is an infinite amount to know about all of this.

 

[Clara Tea]

Bingo.

Interesting, for those getting into AI, machine learning, deep learning, neural networks....no more laws of physics, it's all just data analysis.

No, some things in nature are truly random. Physics still applies.

 

[Clara Tea]

What does randomness actually mean in the context of this discussion?

Does it have to be an event that's theoretically impossible to predict, or simply one where prediction is practically unfeasable?

RANDOM VS. CHAOTIC:

If randomness was impossible to predict, Las Vegas would go broke. Random means that you could go home from Las Vegas a winner, but statisticallly, looking at a large number of gamblers, the casino always makes a fairly steady profit.

If, on the other hand, we were dealing with chaotic numbers (which cannot be predicted), Las Vegas wouldn't have a clue of the outcome.

 

[Clara Tea]

When you talk about conditions becoming sufficiently robust to make an outcome inevitable, is this the same as saying that predictions can be made when there is sufficient data available? In which case, isn’t apparent randomness actually an illusion caused by insufficient data? So everything is determined, if only we have sufficient information to understand how?

Hmm...randomness until there is sufficient data. That's a very interesting point. I believe that you are right, and we can see a demonstration of that when we go from the small world of quantum mechanics to the big world of Newtonian mechanics.

When you toss an apple into the air, you can use equipment to measure the initial velocity, you know the acceleration of gravity (at that altitude), so you can precisely predict how high it will go, and when it will reach the top, and when it will fall on Newton's head. This is called deterministic. That is, deterministic is precisely known.

In the small world of quantum mechanics, nothing is precisely known, everything has random elements (though some things are mixtures of random and non-random events). So, if we shrink Newton to a subatomic particle, we won't be able to tell precisely how high the shrunken apple will go, nor when the shrunken apple will hit shrunken Newton's head.

 

[Clara Tea]

In nature, including all human events, everything is both random and predetermined.

For two atoms to collide they must both have gotten to the same place at the same time and this is caused by random events and random outcomes of events.

Everything is then predetermined by the vector sum total of all such interactions.

A butterfly flaps its wings in China and a hurricane two weeks later becomes predetermined but the butterfly flapping its wings has a far more subtle causation.

In other words once the conditions become sufficiently robust an event becomes inevitable. Whether the results of collisions can be predicted even immediately before the fact or not will probably never really be known. I would guess they have random components caused by the chaotic nature of reality especially on the very small scale or very long time frame.

I agree. And, watch out for those mean butterflies.

 

[Clara Tea]

Yes, but I also mean that things (big things) in the here and now are often very predictable. If a car goes off a bridge you can predict it will hit the water and even predict the "exact" spot with sufficient information. When a hurricane is hurtling at high speed toward a city being driven by prevailing conditions it will become a virtual certainty it will hit it. But we still can't say which butterfly in China caused it. If we observe a butterfly in China flap its wings we can't predict what city will be hit two weeks later. We can't predict which car will go off the bridge until very shortly before it goes off. And, of course, we'll rarely have time to plot its trajectory until after the fact making prediction irrelevant.

With lots of data many things become predictable but then you still won't know the exact damage caused by a hurricane or if the car will hit a cargo carrier instead of the water.



Even when something is successfully predicted like the car hitting the water there are still an infinity (actually a very huge number) of possibilities of details. It's possible in many cases that none of the details is important before or during the fact but these details still drive the future. If the car splashes water on a pier it's an insignificant detail but if it splashes water on baby Einstein drowning him while watching the car it is of extreme importance in the future. But even the exact configuration of the splash will determine where hurricanes strike beginning in two weeks and lasting forever.

Seen from this perspective "randomness" is always real and so is "predetermination". The cargo ship that got hit was just in the "wrong place at the wrong time" in our perspective of an analog reality but it was wholly determined and predetermined from the perspective of small scale events and long timelines; unpredictable but inevitable. What happens in the here and now was determined by everything that happened a fraction of a moment ago everywhere.



No doubt some things can be determined with a probability of very very close to 100%. But no computer model can or will be able to determine the paths of hurricanes by computing the wing beats of every butterfly in China. The programmer won't believe his model is any good within only two weeks.

Hence long range predictions are better: Less accurate but the programmer won't have to explain the deviation.

Tornados, being much smaller than hurricanes, are a bit more random. They tear through a town, destroying this, missing that, destroying this, missing that....So there is an element of randomness in their motion.

"car hitting water...infinite details" Yes, quantum mechanics shows that a simple electron orbiting a simple proton produces an infinite number of dimensions of probability. That's because there are an infinite number of locations to find an electron as it orbits (space can be examined closer and closer).

As I understand it, the initial conditions of a hurricane "might" be altered by a tiny amount and that could move the hurricane far off course, and maybe diminish its power. It derives its power over warm ocean water, so, if it could be slightly nudged, it might change a lot of things. Now we must determine how it can be nudged. Perhaps with chemicals in the air (seeding clouds), or perhaps beaming microwaves at the stratosphere (the HAARP project, in Alaska used microwaves to alter the heat of the stratosphere to reflect radio signals differently).

Butterfly effect....killing baby Einstein would have radically altered the world, and a slight flapping of butterfly wings might, as you suggest, alter various factors and cause major changes.

Causation is time dependent. Maybe time could be somehow altered with relativity? Relativity doesn't just apply to very fast speeds, though its effects are mostly observed at fast speeds. There are very slight effects at slow speeds (the formula of time dilation still applies).

So, if we keep our elbow still, and move our hand back and forth, relativity says we should dilate the time of our hand (it will be younger as a result of moving). Yet, the hand is still attached to the wrist. So, time of one part of your body is different than another part of your body, yet your body is still in one piece.

 

[Clara Tea]

Yes, but I also mean that things (big things) in the here and now are often very predictable. If a car goes off a bridge you can predict it will hit the water and even predict the "exact" spot with sufficient information. When a hurricane is hurtling at high speed toward a city being driven by prevailing conditions it will become a virtual certainty it will hit it. But we still can't say which butterfly in China caused it. If we observe a butterfly in China flap its wings we can't predict what city will be hit two weeks later. We can't predict which car will go off the bridge until very shortly before it goes off. And, of course, we'll rarely have time to plot its trajectory until after the fact making prediction irrelevant.

With lots of data many things become predictable but then you still won't know the exact damage caused by a hurricane or if the car will hit a cargo carrier instead of the water.



Even when something is successfully predicted like the car hitting the water there are still an infinity (actually a very huge number) of possibilities of details. It's possible in many cases that none of the details is important before or during the fact but these details still drive the future. If the car splashes water on a pier it's an insignificant detail but if it splashes water on baby Einstein drowning him while watching the car it is of extreme importance in the future. But even the exact configuration of the splash will determine where hurricanes strike beginning in two weeks and lasting forever.

Seen from this perspective "randomness" is always real and so is "predetermination". The cargo ship that got hit was just in the "wrong place at the wrong time" in our perspective of an analog reality but it was wholly determined and predetermined from the perspective of small scale events and long timelines; unpredictable but inevitable. What happens in the here and now was determined by everything that happened a fraction of a moment ago everywhere.



No doubt some things can be determined with a probability of very very close to 100%. But no computer model can or will be able to determine the paths of hurricanes by computing the wing beats of every butterfly in China. The programmer won't believe his model is any good within only two weeks.

Hence long range predictions are better: Less accurate but the programmer won't have to explain the deviation.

Hang on, working on that....I think I got it....nope, a dragon fly in Hawaii threw off my calculations.

Seriously, I see your point. It's like affecting a huge truck with a ping pong ball.

If we could predict future events, and take measures to prevent bad outcomes, we could, quite probably, change the future. But, there are, no doubt, certain events (like earthquakes) that are difficult to prevent. Maybe fracking could lube the fault? Maybe an explosive in the fault could nudge it slightly before it bursts?

 

[cladking]

So, if we keep our elbow still, and move our hand back and forth, relativity says we should dilate the time of our hand (it will be younger as a result of moving). Yet, the hand is still attached to the wrist. So, time of one part of your body is different than another part of your body, yet your body is still in one piece.

Interesting concept.

I guess I always took my hands along for the ride when I'm an observer in a thought experiment.

If we could predict future events, and take measures to prevent bad outcomes, we could, quite probably, change the future. But, there are, no doubt, certain events (like earthquakes) that are difficult to prevent. Maybe fracking could lube the fault? Maybe an explosive in the fault could nudge it slightly before it bursts?

Yes. Certainly.

Events that are massive and less controllable simply require a butterfly further back in time. Perhaps a butterfly like creature on another planet as the earth was still forming.

 

[cladking]

Tornados, being much smaller than hurricanes, are a bit more random. They tear through a town, destroying this, missing that, destroying this, missing that....So there is an element of randomness in their motion.

A tornado skipped right over my head when I was a boy. Well... ...within a quarter mile anyway. I think of them more as "four dimensional" than "random". Of course some never leave the ground even in hilly areas and my existence could depend on the difference.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Hmm...randomness until there is sufficient data. That's a very interesting point. I believe that you are right, and we can see a demonstration of that when we go from the small world of quantum mechanics to the big world of Newtonian mechanics.

When you toss an apple into the air, you can use equipment to measure the initial velocity, you know the acceleration of gravity (at that altitude), so you can precisely predict how high it will go, and when it will reach the top, and when it will fall on Newton's head. This is called deterministic. That is, deterministic is precisely known.

In the small world of quantum mechanics, nothing is precisely known, everything has random elements (though some things are mixtures of random and non-random events). So, if we shrink Newton to a subatomic particle, we won't be able to tell precisely how high the shrunken apple will go, nor when the shrunken apple will hit shrunken Newton's head.

And the Uncertainty Principle dictates that there is always a limit to the amount of information we can hold about an object’s state at any given point in time. So in that sense, an element of randomness always remains, at the quantum level anyway. At the macro level, decoherence occurs and the universe becomes fully deterministic. But I don’t yet understand decoherence, except in the vaguest terms.

 

[setarcos]

My question here would be, without complete understanding, is the opposite assumption (that it is all predetermined) justified?
In my opinion.

Absolute proof is beyond the scientific method and the Scientists abilities to recognize it who rely upon such methods. That's just the limitations we have to deal with. Science deals in collecting data. That's it. All else is faith. Even the so called "laws" of nature cannot be definitively proven to be inviolable laws. They have been determined to be laws through probabilistic analysis. Many, many experiments show the same results so we predict that the next experiment will too. That's not a proof of necessity. That's probability analysis.
Theists believe God has determined the future of all things. Atheists believe randomness happens. Both are faith based given our limited comprehensive abilities.
To answer your original question....we as humans cannot know for certain that a thing is truly random or predetermined. That is beyond our perceptive abilities. Within our perceptive abilities we can treat something, definitionally, as random or predetermined but to truly know, ironically, would require, by definition, God like abilities.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Absolute proof is beyond the scientific method and the Scientists abilities to recognize it who rely upon such methods. That's just the limitations we have to deal with. Science deals in collecting data. That's it. All else is faith. Even the so called "laws" of nature cannot be definitively proven to be inviolable laws. They have been determined to be laws through probabilistic analysis. Many, many experiments show the same results so we predict that the next experiment will too. That's not a proof of necessity. That's probability analysis.
Theists believe God has determined the future of all things. Atheists believe randomness happens. Both are faith based given our limited comprehensive abilities.
To answer your original question....we as humans cannot know for certain that a thing is truly random or predetermined. That is beyond our perceptive abilities. Within our perceptive abilities we can treat something, definitionally, as random or predetermined but to truly know, ironically, would require, by definition, God like abilities.

If an objective view of the universe is possible at all, it must by definition be a God’s eye view, indeed.

We know that the act of observation itself has an effect on the phenomenon being observed; we cannot passively look at the world as it would be were we not observing it.

 

[viole]

I admit when the idea for this thread titled, "does randomness exist in nature?"
came up i thought it would be easy just to trawl the internet for a few examples of seemingly random events in nature such as the radioactive decay of certain elements.

Then the question naturally arises, how do we know an event is truly random, or conversely, how do we know an event is truly predetermined?

I did some hasty googling and realised I might be a bit over my head on the second question, so I'm hoping some of our more knowledgeable members will chime in, but what I vaguely gathered is that you would have to have an infinite sample size to determine if something was truly random or predetermined, since even seeming patterns still have a chance of being the outcome of a random event.

Thoughts?

The question is whether lack of randomness exists in nature. All things we see appear not random just because the average value assumed by a lot of random things tends to be nice and stable. Take a body made of zillions of particles, each one flipping randomly between black and white, and your body would be and stay solidly grey. Check the individual particle, and things might get different.

for starters, i think that quantum entanglement allows to exclude the existence of hidden variables that would make fundamental phenomena ultimately deterministic. That is essentially what the Bell’s theorem states. Those hidden variables exist, for instance, in case of flipping a coin. Flipping a coin appears random because all those variables, which would render the process deterministic if known, are hidden to us. But they seem to be absent in case of particle physics, which would entail particle behavior is inherently random.

However, that could be relative on the observer. If a particle is in a superposition of two states and I measure its state, then the result might appear random. 50% i measure one state, 50% i measure the other. Inherently random. But it could be that I become also part of the superposition. If that is the case, then there will be a viole measuring one state and another viole measuring the other state, and both in a superposition of states, and unaware of each other.

in that case, QM would not be random. All events that can happen, will happen. And the measurements we do will split the observers too, creating parallel worlds where each observer would have the illusion to have witnessed a inherently random process.

ciao

- viole

 

[setarcos]

We know that the act of observation itself has an effect on the phenomenon being observed; we cannot passively look at the world as it would be where we not observing it.

Indeed. Quantum physics has muddled the waters of comprehension somewhat. Here's a thought though, how is it that quantum phenomena holds a seemingly uniformly experienced existence together from our point of view? Since everyone can't observe everything at once some other factors of observation must be at play. One theory is an existent God who is never not looking at everything at once and our collapsing of the quantum fields are experiences of its observations.