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Chapman & Hall/CRC eBooks

To Be or Not To Be?

George G. Szpiro

Published Dec 10, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Now that we have defined, described, and tested random numbers, the question arises: do random numbers exist? Can true randomness occur in nature? Albert Einstein’s famous dictum “God does not play dice” – uttered about the then new-fangled theory of quantum mechanics and its inherent random nature – expressed his belief that everything is deterministic, that there is no true randomness in nature. Did the great physicist turn full circle to the early religious doctrines which claims that it is God’s finger that determines everything?

DOI
10.1201/9781003641520-4

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Now that we have defined, described, and tested random numbers, the question arises: do random numbers exist? Can true randomness occur in nature? Albert Einstein’s famous dictum “God does not play dice” – uttered about the then new-fangled theory of quantum mechanics and its inherent random nature – expressed his belief that everything is deterministic, that there is no true randomness in nature. Did the great physicist turn full circle to the early religious doctrines which claims that it is God’s finger that determines everything?
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.
Albert Einstein made fundamental contributions to the development of quantum mechanics. However, he was never satisfied with the quantum worldview. In fact, during most of his life he attempted to find inconsistencies and paradoxes within quantum mechanics. His famous quote "God does not play dice" shows how disturbing was to Einstein one of the most important aspects of quantum mechanics: non-determinism. In this paper we will present the basic concepts of quantum mechanics, we will describe Einstein's attempts to destroy it and we will discuss why we can nowadays state that, in this regard, Albert Einstein was not right.
Einstein was one of the founders of quantum mechanics, yet he disliked the randomness that lies at the heart of the theory. God does not, he famously said, play dice. However, quantum theory has survived a century of experimental tests, although it has yet to be reconciled with another of Einstein's great discoveries – the general theory of relativity. Below four theorists – Gerard 't Hooft, Edward Witten, Fay Dowker and Paul Davies– outline their views on the current status of quantum theory and the way forward
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.