Steal this Thesis – How Uncertainty is “Baked In” to our Universe, and What That Means

The beautiful thing about Einstein’s path to his Theory of Relativity and Special Relativity is that they began as thought experiments. Briefly, Einstein realized that if you were in a free-falling elevator, you would be unable to distinguish between gravity and acceleration. From that came the inevitable conclusion that gravity is a warping of the space-time continuum.

And in the same way, we can have a thought experiment about what happens when we get, distance-wise, down to the Planck Length and enter the realm of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This principle, which is really a law of physics in my book, states that when measuring down to the Planck Length, one cannot know both the position and the momentum of a quantum object such as a photon. It’s just the math. There’s fuzziness built into the fabric of the universe.

Now, Einstein and Neils Bohr, the “father” of quantum theory, debated the meaning of these measurements for years. Einstein felt that God did not “roll the dice” and that given enough information and data, everything could be calculated. Not so in quantum mechanics. There are certain inherent unknowables.

Let’s see if we can start a thought experiment by asking the right question. Furthermore, let’s take as a given that this fuzziness in math is built into the system, or “baked in” as the title to this blog might suggest. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that all of the particles that sprang into existence from whatever creation event you want to choose (I opt for the Big Bang, with possibly an infinite loop of successive Big Bangs followed by subsequent collapses of these universes).

We can therefore see that this fuzziness is a quality that takes us out of the billiard ball universe of every motion being calculable in advance, given enough data. Of course, some will argue that the problem is that we can’t know the initial conditions of this grand billiard ball game of life. If we knew the initial conditions, then everything is just a hashing out of physical laws. But this fuzziness in the math makes the outcome indeterminable, almost it seems by design.

And one cannot help but think that given this fuzziness in the math of the reality around us in which we inhabit, that our conscious minds might be a factor in how the indeterminate part of reality becomes determinate. And so the next time a carnie asks you to pick a number, any number, understand that your choice is not predetermined (necessarily, but that’s for another blog). I would further argue that evidence of Synchronicity supports this thesis of free will being “baked in” to our universe.

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