Einsteins Dice and Schrodingers Cat - Paul Halpern
Category: Science
Tags: Science
Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrdinger were friends and comrades-in-arms against what they considered the most preposterous aspects of quantum physics: its indeterminacy. Einstein famously quipped that God does not play dice with the universe, and Schrdinger is equally well known for his thought experiment about the cat in the box who ends up spread out in a probabilistic state, neither wholly alive nor wholly dead. Both of these famous images arose from these two mens dissatisfaction with quantum weirdness and with their assertion that underneath it all, there must be some essentially deterministic world. Even though it was Einsteins own theories that made quantum mechanics possible, both he and Schrdinger could not bear the idea that the universe was, at its most fundamental level, random., As the Second World War raged, both men struggled to produce a theory that would describe in full the universes ultimate design, first as collaborators, then as competitors. They both ultimately fai
