‘God does not play dice?’ Image Credit: ‘Lucky number six’, Photo by SauLustig, CC0 Public Domain, via pixabay. ‘A theory founded in this way on arguments of manifestly approximate character,’ he wrote some years later, ‘however good the approximation, is surely of provisional nature.’ To Irish physicist John Bell this seemed to be at best a confidence-trick, at worst a fraud. We postulate the collapse in an attempt to explain how a quantum system with many different possible outcomes before measurement transforms into a system with one and only one result after measurement. So what evidence do we have for this mysterious collapse of the wavefunction? Well, none actually.
To make matters worse, if the collapse is instantaneous then this implies what Einstein called a ‘spooky action-at-a-distance’ which, he argued, appeared to violate a key postulate of his own special theory of relativity. Chance is inherent in the collapse of the wavefunction, and it was this feature of quantum theory that got Einstein so upset. But there is no predicting precisely where an individual electron will be found. When we look to see where the electron actually is, the wavefunction is said to ‘collapse’ instantaneously, and appears ‘here’ with a frequency consistent with the probability predicted by quantum theory. In essence, a quantum particle such as an electron may be described in terms of a delocalized ‘wavefunction’, with probabilities for appearing ‘here’ or ‘there’. Ever since it was discovered that atomic and sub-atomic particles exhibit both localised, particle-like properties and delocalised, wave-like properties physicists have become ravelled in a debate about what we can and can’t know about the ‘true’ nature of physical reality.Īlbert Einstein once famously declared that God does not play dice. This business about the distinction between ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘things-as-they-appear’ has troubled philosophers for as long as the subject has existed, but what does it have to do with modern physics, specifically the story of quantum theory? In fact, such questions have dogged the theory almost from the moment of its inception in the 1920s. ‘If a tree falls in the forest…’ Image Credit: ‘Fallen Tree’, Photo by Unsplash, CC0 Public Domain, via pixabay. So, if we interpret the word ‘sound’ to mean a human experience rather than a physical phenomenon, then when there is nobody around there is a sense in which the falling tree makes no sound at all. We have no basis for our common-sense assumption that these secondary qualities reflect or represent reality as it really is. Philosophers have long argued that sound, colour, taste, smell and touch are all secondary qualities which exist only in our minds. Everything to this point is explicable in terms of physics and chemistry, but the process by which we turn electrical signals in the brain into human perception and experience in the mind remains, at present, unfathomable.
The human auditory apparatus simply translates one set of physical phenomena into another, leading eventually to stimulation of those parts of the brain cortex responsible for the perception of sound. Now, to a large extent, we can interpret the actions of human sense organs in much the same way we interpret mechanical measuring devices. But sound is also a human experience, the result of physical signals delivered by human sense organs which are synthesized in the mind as a form of perception. Here the word ‘sound’ is used to describe a physical phenomenon – the wave disturbance. If by sound we mean compressions and rarefactions in the air which result from the physical disturbances caused by the falling tree and which propagate through the air with audio frequencies, then we might not hesitate to answer in the affirmative.
Of course, the answer depends on how we choose to interpret the use of the word ‘ sound’. If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody around to hear, does it make a sound?įor centuries philosophers have been teasing our intellects with such questions.
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