🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi folks,

In article <TORKEL.92Nov9204231@bast.sics.se> torkel@sics.se
(Torkel Franzen) writes:

> In article <emc.721244750@tristan> emc@doe.carleton.ca (Eli Chiprout) writes:
>
> | Einstein fought against Quantum Theory until his last days because he
> | felt that it completely contradicted God as he understood God to be.
>
> Einstein didn't "fight" QT, he thought it was incomplete. As for his
> reasons, or if you like, philosophical prejudices, he made them clear
> enough.  They were quite ordinary realistic philosophical prejudices...
> 
> He didn't base them on any ideas about God, as far as his actual writings
> and reported explanations indicate. Almost invariably, people who imagine
> that Einstein proceeded from theology to philosophy and physics base this
> view on nothing more than one or two aphoristic formulations.

Since I may have indirectly helped initiate this thread with my earlier
comments about the strong theistic views of Newton, I guess I should briefly
add that nothing I've ever seen about Dr. Einstein ever gave me the idea
that his rejection of QM was based on his Judaic background.  (If your
particular religious upbringing was the *only* issue, then I suppose Dr.
Richard Feynman should also have been adamantly anti-QM also, hmmmmm?)

The persistence with which people blandly gloss over Einstein's objections
to QM as trivial or simply biased astonishes me.  Folks might try reading
the biography "Subtle is the Lord" to get a feel for the depth of his
thinking about the issue -- it was a good deal deeper and more profound
than most of us will every realize, I suspect.

The kernel of Einstein's objections appeared to center around the curious
problem of a universe in which the timelines of all objects are not fully
determined, yet time itself is relative to the inertial frame of the user.

If more than one person can be in the "past" relative to some event that
is being observed, how *do* you reconcile the idea of a future that is
not yet fully determined?  It's not a trivial question, nor has anyone
every fully resolved it, at least not by anything I've ever seen or read.

Winners do tend to rewrite history, as they say, and Einstein was not the
winner when it came to QM -- even though 99.99999 percent of the ordinary
population of the world (or more!) would heartily agree with Einstein's
pragmatic view that, for example, the moon *really does* exist without
having to have its wavefunction collapsed by an observer.

				Cheers,
				Terry Bollinger

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| Terry Bollinger                            | Phone: 214-518-3538           |
| Advanced Switching Laboratory, NEC America |   Fax: 214-518-3499           |
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