Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

Oxford University Press eBooks

Throwing Dice? Thoughts of God in a Quantum World

Shaun C. Henson

Published May 19, 2016• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract Quantum mechanics, like other enormously successful physical theories, accurately describes how the natural world behaves. Its explanatory powers regarding the indeterminate behavior of the smallest constituents of nature have proven to be both profound and practical. Many technological devices from lasers to computer chips are based on quantum mechanics. Not surprisingly, the universe filled with microscopic random events revealed by quantum mechanics has generated wonder and interpretive bewilderment. Reactions to the unsettling revelations of quantum unpredictability have included appeals to unknown variables to preserve classical physics, and even wholesale theoretical dismissals. Far from proof of mathematical trickery or theoretical incompletion however, the now well-established and irreducible quantum randomness suggests a physical universe that is open to a future not determined by the past, and perhaps to a God that really does play dice.

DOI
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190277154.003.0014

Related papers

Decoherence and hidden variables

Scott Aaronson

Why have so many great thinkers found quantum mechanics so hard to swallow? To hear some people tell it, the whole source of the trouble is that “God plays dice with the universe” – that, whereas classical mechanics could in principle predict the fall of every sparrow, quantum mechanics gives you only statistical predictions. Well, you know what? Whoop-de-doo! If indeterminism were the only mystery about quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics wouldn't be mysterious at all . We could imagine, if we liked, that the universe did have a definite state at any time, but that some fundamental principle (besides the obvious practical difficulties) kept us from knowing the whole state. This wouldn't require any serious revision of our worldview. Sure, “God would be throwing dice,” but in such a benign way that not even Einstein could have any real beef with it. The real trouble in quantum mechanics is not that the future trajectory of a particle is indeterministic – it’s that the past trajectory is also indeterministic! Or more accurately, the very notion of a “trajectory” is undefined, since until you measure, there’s just an evolving wavefunction. And crucially, because of the defining feature of quantum mechanics – interference between positive and negative amplitudes – this wavefunction can’t be seen as merely a product of our ignorance, in the same way that a probability distribution can.

Cambridge University Press eBooks•Mar 14, 2013•0 citations

Dice and Divine Action

Karl Giberson

Abstract The world picture disclosed by classical physics, beginning with Kepler, Galileo, and Newton and continuing until the early part of the twentieth century, was increasingly deterministic. The prevailing metaphor was that of a clock: as a clock is wound up and runs in an entirely predictable way which can be known from its initial conditions, so the universe unfolds according to a deterministic plan. Such a universe, unfolding under the influence of forces so absolute they were called ‘laws’, appeared to have limited opportunity for divine action. The theological response to this world picture was deism: God created the world but it runs on its own. This world picture collapsed in the early twentieth century as quantum mechanics was discovered and developed into a central, if not the central, part of scientific understanding of physical reality. The quantum-mechanical world picture cannot be modelled after the gears, pulleys, and levers of the classical world: its irreducible constituent parts are more like tiny clouds than tiny gears. Furthermore, the behaviour of these smallest parts was discovered to be indeterministic, and eternally so until observed by a mind. The mysterious behaviour of quantum particles, which compose all reality, and the puzzling role of minds invited speculation that God may be acting through the natural order to influence events. Such divine action could exist entirely within the envelope of possibilities possessed by quantum particles and thus not require any disruption of the natural order.

Oxford University Press eBooks•Jun 9, 2021•0 citations

Foundational issues of Chaos and Randomness: "God or Devil, do we have a Choice?"

Prabhakar G. Vaidya, Nithin Nagaraj, B. V. Sreekantan

This article is about two competing paradigms to explain the nature of our physical world. The prevalent paradigm is ‘Randomness’, which is intrinsic in Quantum Mechanics (QM) and regarded as essential to our universe, an attribute that led to the famous remark by Einstein – “God does not play dice

•Jan 1, 2006•1 citation

Qubit as the natural unit measure of random choice

Vasil Dinev Penchev

Einstein wrote his famous sentence "God does not play dice with the universe" in a letter to Max Born in 1920. All experiments have confirmed that quantum mechanics is neither wrong nor “incomplete”. One can says that God does play dice with the universe. Let quantum mechanics be granted as the rules generalizing all results of playing some imaginary God’s dice. If that is the case, one can ask how God’s dice should look like. God’s dice turns out to be a qubit and thus having the shape of a unit ball. Any item in the universe as well the universe itself is both infinitely many rolls and a single roll of that dice for it has infinitely many “sides”. Thus both the smooth motion of classical physics and the discrete motion introduced in addition by quantum mechanics can be described uniformly correspondingly as an infinite series converges to some limit and as a quantum jump directly into that limit. The second, imaginary dimension of God’s dice corresponds to energy, i.e. to the velocity of information change between two probabilities in both series and jump.

•May 29, 2020•0 citations

God's Dice

Васил Пенчев

Einstein wrote his famous sentence "God does not play dice with the universe" in a letter to Max Born in 1920. All experiments have confirmed that quantum mechanics is neither wrong nor “incomplete”. One can says that God does play dice with the universe. Let quantum mechanics be granted as the rules generalizing all results of playing some imaginary God’s dice. If that is the case, one can ask how God’s dice should look like. God’s dice turns out to be a qubit and thus having the shape of a unit ball. Any item in the universe as well the universe itself is both infinitely many rolls and a single roll of that dice for it has infinitely many “sides”. Thus both the smooth motion of classical physics and the discrete motion introduced in addition by quantum mechanics can be described uniformly correspondingly as an infinite series converges to some limit and as a quantum jump directly into that limit. The second, imaginary dimension of God’s dice corresponds to energy, i.e. to the velocity of information change between two probabilities in both series and jump.

•Jan 1, 2015•0 citations

Theorist charts a deterministic future

Edwin Cartlidge

The idea of determinism has had a powerful grip on the imagination of physicists ever since Pierre Simon Laplace evoked the idea of the clockwork universe. When Einstein uttered his famous phrase God doesn't play dice, he was expressing his unhappiness with the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, believing that beneath quantum theory must lie a deeper, deterministic theory of nature. But such has been the huge success of quantum theory that most physicists now believe that the ultimate physical theory will be quantum mechanical and that nature is fundamentally random.

Physics World•Nov 1, 2003•0 citations
Abstract Quantum mechanics, like other enormously successful physical theories, accurately describes how the natural world behaves. Its explanatory powers regarding the indeterminate behavior of the smallest constituents of nature have proven to be both profound and practical. Many technological devices from lasers to computer chips are based on quantum mechanics. Not surprisingly, the universe filled with microscopic random events revealed by quantum mechanics has generated wonder and interpretive bewilderment. Reactions to the unsettling revelations of quantum unpredictability have included appeals to unknown variables to preserve classical physics, and even wholesale theoretical dismissals. Far from proof of mathematical trickery or theoretical incompletion however, the now well-established and irreducible quantum randomness suggests a physical universe that is open to a future not determined by the past, and perhaps to a God that really does play dice.
Why have so many great thinkers found quantum mechanics so hard to swallow? To hear some people tell it, the whole source of the trouble is that “God plays dice with the universe” – that, whereas classical mechanics could in principle predict the fall of every sparrow, quantum mechanics gives you only statistical predictions. Well, you know what? Whoop-de-doo! If indeterminism were the only mystery about quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics wouldn't be mysterious at all . We could imagine, if we liked, that the universe did have a definite state at any time, but that some fundamental principle (besides the obvious practical difficulties) kept us from knowing the whole state. This wouldn't require any serious revision of our worldview. Sure, “God would be throwing dice,” but in such a benign way that not even Einstein could have any real beef with it. The real trouble in quantum mechanics is not that the future trajectory of a particle is indeterministic – it’s that the past trajectory is also indeterministic! Or more accurately, the very notion of a “trajectory” is undefined, since until you measure, there’s just an evolving wavefunction. And crucially, because of the defining feature of quantum mechanics – interference between positive and negative amplitudes – this wavefunction can’t be seen as merely a product of our ignorance, in the same way that a probability distribution can.
Abstract The world picture disclosed by classical physics, beginning with Kepler, Galileo, and Newton and continuing until the early part of the twentieth century, was increasingly deterministic. The prevailing metaphor was that of a clock: as a clock is wound up and runs in an entirely predictable way which can be known from its initial conditions, so the universe unfolds according to a deterministic plan. Such a universe, unfolding under the influence of forces so absolute they were called ‘laws’, appeared to have limited opportunity for divine action. The theological response to this world picture was deism: God created the world but it runs on its own. This world picture collapsed in the early twentieth century as quantum mechanics was discovered and developed into a central, if not the central, part of scientific understanding of physical reality. The quantum-mechanical world picture cannot be modelled after the gears, pulleys, and levers of the classical world: its irreducible constituent parts are more like tiny clouds than tiny gears. Furthermore, the behaviour of these smallest parts was discovered to be indeterministic, and eternally so until observed by a mind. The mysterious behaviour of quantum particles, which compose all reality, and the puzzling role of minds invited speculation that God may be acting through the natural order to influence events. Such divine action could exist entirely within the envelope of possibilities possessed by quantum particles and thus not require any disruption of the natural order.
Einstein wrote his famous sentence "God does not play dice with the universe" in a letter to Max Born in 1920. All experiments have confirmed that quantum mechanics is neither wrong nor “incomplete”. One can says that God does play dice with the universe. Let quantum mechanics be granted as the rules generalizing all results of playing some imaginary God’s dice. If that is the case, one can ask how God’s dice should look like. God’s dice turns out to be a qubit and thus having the shape of a unit ball. Any item in the universe as well the universe itself is both infinitely many rolls and a single roll of that dice for it has infinitely many “sides”. Thus both the smooth motion of classical physics and the discrete motion introduced in addition by quantum mechanics can be described uniformly correspondingly as an infinite series converges to some limit and as a quantum jump directly into that limit. The second, imaginary dimension of God’s dice corresponds to energy, i.e. to the velocity of information change between two probabilities in both series and jump.
Einstein wrote his famous sentence "God does not play dice with the universe" in a letter to Max Born in 1920. All experiments have confirmed that quantum mechanics is neither wrong nor “incomplete”. One can says that God does play dice with the universe. Let quantum mechanics be granted as the rules generalizing all results of playing some imaginary God’s dice. If that is the case, one can ask how God’s dice should look like. God’s dice turns out to be a qubit and thus having the shape of a unit ball. Any item in the universe as well the universe itself is both infinitely many rolls and a single roll of that dice for it has infinitely many “sides”. Thus both the smooth motion of classical physics and the discrete motion introduced in addition by quantum mechanics can be described uniformly correspondingly as an infinite series converges to some limit and as a quantum jump directly into that limit. The second, imaginary dimension of God’s dice corresponds to energy, i.e. to the velocity of information change between two probabilities in both series and jump.
The idea of determinism has had a powerful grip on the imagination of physicists ever since Pierre Simon Laplace evoked the idea of the clockwork universe. When Einstein uttered his famous phrase God doesn't play dice, he was expressing his unhappiness with the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, believing that beneath quantum theory must lie a deeper, deterministic theory of nature. But such has been the huge success of quantum theory that most physicists now believe that the ultimate physical theory will be quantum mechanical and that nature is fundamentally random.