Linked Questions

The possibility of randomness in physics doesnt particularly bother me, but contemplating the possibility that quarks might be made up of something even smaller, just in general, leads me to think ...

In the special theory of relativity, each event is a point in 4d spacetime. And we can represent our life as a world line in the spacetime. Then, if we somehow find out the mathematical equation of ...

Suppose you know at time $t$ that there is some atomic nucleus that radioactively decays. If you were to magically roll back the universe to the exact same state and let it continue as per usual ...

This would mean that every event happens because of what has hapened before it and there is no randomness factor. At a microscopic level, the motion of atoms is a result of the motion of other atoms ...

I am a physics high-school student so my knowledge is not very deep on the subject. We started learnning about quantum mechanics and on some processes that my teacher described as random. I began to ...

Is there a general consensus about whether the universe is deterministic? Is it still up in the air? I have attempted to read other physics.stackexchange answers and do some independent research, but ...

Does Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle mean that the universe cannot deterministically be predicted by observers, or does it mean that the universe is inherently indeterministic, meaning that the ...

By truly random I mean that IF we knew the position and velocity of every particle in radioactive isotope, could we predict when the decay would happen?

I often hear people say that quantum randomness is “true randomness”, but I don’t really understand it. Please bear with my question. Before the development of quantum physics, randomness is ...

According to classical physics if we know space-time coordinates of every atom in the universe, we can predict the future. But quantum physics introduced probability throwing determinism out of ...

I am trying to understand what decides the outcome of an experiment and if there is any theory (e.g. non-local hidden variable theory) that is able to predict the outcome.

I am not a physicist but I've started studying the subject and noticed that terms like "random", "randomness", "randomly" are widely used when talking about nature. For example, random movement of ...

In a simulation everything is known which makes any apparent random event a pre-calculated event. Taking that into account is it possible to simulate the universe with absolute accuracy in a way that ...

It is implied, per QM, that the behavior of subatomic particles cannot be precisely predicted. However, these indeterministic effects do have defined probabilities. By the law of large numbers, they ...

Neurons fire depending on the impulses they get from other neurons. This seems to be 'deterministic'. However, sometimes it might be useful to use random processes instead. Does the human brain have ...

I'm not trying to be unscientific here but i cannot wrap this around my head that scientifically anything can work randomly except a conscious mind which is capable of making a random decision. how ...

Can there exist an argument that could be used for proving that the universe is indeterministic? If this one seems to be too strict (rigorous), I would also be interested to know a 1-sentence ...

Is there (in universe, wherever) anything random? Do we know any event (or whatever else) which has no reason? Of course there are some things that we cannot see, measure but it doesn't mean that they ...

I personally believe that there is a very strong case in favor of true randomness in QM but not being a physicist I would like to know from experts if there is a consensus about this. @John Rennie: ...

The question might look clear from a viewpoint of a non-physics guy but let me be more specific. Can we say quantum leaps or waves or maybe the universe itself are completely indeterministic or do ...

I am told that we can't predict whether we shall get a head or tail. We can only say that for an unbiased coin there is 50% probability for either. But coin is not case of Quantum Physics! I have ...

I am sorry for the title, which seems to be into the philosophical discussions about reality going random in quantum scale. My aim is to approach the question in a definite and most reasonable, though ...

I'll elaborate and be more specific. I understand that this is almost a metaphysical question but nonetheless I want to give it a try. Could an external being outside our Universe create 10 ...

If we know the state of the universe at a certain point in time, is the future set? There have been quite a few similar questions on here and some of the answers were quite useful to me. But there is ...

Does God Play With Dice? by Stephen Hawking I am no physicists, but I don't get the concept of God playing with dice. Logic shows me that the entire universe is calculated very precisely according ...

What if there were 2 universes (completely disconnected - not part of the same multiverse) which were identical and a given point in time (say when they first began). Would these 2 universes evolve in ...

Apparently radioactive decay cannot is entirely random (I'm just picking something that's currently accepted as random). However, since it's caused by something, if you had the means to do so, surely ...

first >> we know that quantum mechanics works with a probabilistic nature so that we can't say " what will happen? " but " what might happen? " second >> we can ask how ...

It occurred to me that the limits of possibility to the nature of the universe is it is either deterministic ie we are all at the will of natural laws that determine the outcome of events from the ...

I'm a mechanical engineer by training, so please forgive ignorance in my question. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states (to my understanding) that one cannot measure both position and momentum ...

This question was very interesting to a non physicists like me question (I am computer scientist and I work with "pure random" crypto hardware that uses quantum phenomena) Obviously string ...

If everything in the universe happens according to rules, thermodynamic or otherwise, then how would anything (or any choice) ever be stochastic? Multiple choices might be probable, but in any instant ...

This is a hypothetical question, and if this is not the place to ask it, i have zero problem in deleting it, but as i have asked some question in the similar "field" and always got ...

The conductors of this experiment claim that causality is broken or at least made fuzzy by quantum mechanics. Is this really the case?

I came across a very recent paper by Gerard 't Hooft. The abstract says: It is often claimed that the collapse of the wave function and Born's rule to interpret the square of the norm as a ...

I've always wondered (and was re-inspired to explore further from these two videos) that if at a single point of time we know about the complete state (position, momentum, spins, everything.) of every ...

What are the main problems that we need to solve to prove Laplace's determinism correct and overcome the Uncertainty principle?

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the conservation of information principle as formulated by Susskind and others. From the most upvoted answers to this post, it seems that the principle ...

I think the question is vague but interesting. I was wondering if we trace backwards the cause of any event, and then cause of that cause and so on... where will we end up? Is there just one trigger ...

Are there examples of phenomena/events/states of affairs (henceforth "events") whose outcomes are thought to be unpredictable, even in principle? I.e. are there events such that if one had access ...

Considering every cause has an action, how can anything be random? For something to happen, it must have a cause and through that definition it can't be random. Considering this why are many quantum ...

Someone once told me that if, in theory, we could know the position and motion of all the particles in the universe, we could use that data to run time backwards, and work out everything that had come ...

Probability arises inherently from a lack of information. For example, if I were to take a ball out of a bag with 3 yellow and 2 white balls, I would have a 0.6 probability of getting a yellow and a 0....

Is possible a non-deterministic propagation of the wave function in the QM?

I have recently entered university — studying CS — and I have spoken to many physics students on campus. Most of these — when propmted — will gladly proclaim that QM is ...

I'm reading Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking. In chapter 4, it discusses whether we can predict the future. As many have known that Laplace put forth that if we knew the positions ...

If after a Big Crunch, the new singularity explodes in a Big Bang, would we get the same Universe all over again? Since black holes retain all the information they've stored, would we get an exact ...

I have been trying to learn about the randomness in Quantum Physics. But of the many sources I referred to, some say about "Randomness in Quantum physics" and some others say about "Quantum ...

For example, you go to a website that generates a random number. You get the number 8. What would happen if you went back in time a few minutes, and repeated the same actions. Would you get the same ...

I don't really know if this question has an anwser but I thought it was worth to try asking. My point here is the following: in Quantum Mechanics, to describe the states of a system we use a Hilbert ...