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From: jqb@netcom.com (Jim Balter)
Subject: Re: Einstein folklore. was: Zeleny on predictability (was FIRST order?)
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Date: Mon, 31 Jul 1995 07:56:51 GMT
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In article <3vhn48$jt9@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz>,
Bill Taylor <wft@math.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman) writes:
>|>    There are some philosophers, and some scientists, who
>|> dislike the idea intensely. Einstein was one, though I don't know
>|> whether the remark often attributed to him (`God does not play
>|> dice', or somesuch) was really uttered by him.
>
>Almost certainly not.  But it's a great folklore.

Almost certainly so, since Einstein reviewed and approved the quotations
appearing under his name in George Seldes' _The Great Quotations_.  In a
letter to Max Born, Einstein wrote (this is partly in German and partly in
English in TGQ) "I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the
world ... God is shrewd, but he is not malicious."

>Not only that, but he didn't even subscribe to the idea all that amount.
>It's true that right at the start of the probability interpretation of QM
>he expressed keen dissatisfaction with it, insisting QM must be ioncomplete.
>
>However, this attitude passed *very* quickly, (maybe only a year or two), as
>he realized that such an view was worthless.

Einstein conceded the uncertainty principle in 1930, when Bohr showed that GR
itself disproved Einstein's counter- thought experiment, but he remained
convinced that physical theory based fundamentally on the concept of
probability would prove to be unacceptable.  In his autobiographical notes he
wrote that QM was incomplete and offered "no useful point of departure for
future development".  In a letter to Otto Juliusburger in 1942, Einstein
repeated that he believed that "Gott wurfelt nicht", but added "But maybe I've
earned the right to make my mistakes", an indication of his "resigned
bitterness" toward QM advocates more interested in converting him from heresy
than listening to what he had to say.

[These comments are paraphrased from Jamie Sayen's excellent _Einstein in
America_; q.v. for fuller coverage and further references.]


"Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem--in my opinion--to
characterize our age." -- Albert Einstein
-- 
<J Q B>

