Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again Insanity Quote

Einstein's Parable of Breakthrough Insanity

Einstein refused to believe in the inherent unpredictability of the world. Is the subatomic world insane, or just subtle?

Credit: James O'Brien for Quanta Magazine

From Quanta Magazine ( find original story here ).

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting unlike results."

That witticism—I'll telephone call it "Einstein Insanity"—is usually attributed to Albert Einstein. Though the Matthew issue may be operating here, it is undeniably the sort of clever, memorable one-liner that Einstein oft tossed off. And I'thou happy to give him the credit, considering doing so takes us in interesting directions.

First of all, note that what Einstein describes as insanity is, according to quantum theory, the mode the world really works. In quantum mechanics yous can do the same matter many times and go different results. Indeed, that is the premise underlying great high-energy particle colliders. In those colliders, physicists bash together the same particles in precisely the same mode, trillions upon trillions of times. Are they all insane to practice so? It would seem they are not, since they have garnered a stupendous variety of results.

Of grade Einstein, famously, did not believe in the inherent unpredictability of the globe, saying "God does not play dice." Yet in playing dice, we act out Einstein Insanity: We practise the same affair over and over—namely, roll the die—and we correctly anticipate different results. Is it really insane to play dice? If so, it's a very common class of madness!

Nosotros can evade the diagnosis by arguing that in practice ane never throws the dice in precisely the aforementioned way. Very small changes in the initial conditions tin can alter the results. The underlying thought here is that in situations where nosotros tin can't predict precisely what's going to happen next, it's considering there are aspects of the current state of affairs that nosotros haven't taken into business relationship. Similar pleas of ignorance tin can defend many other applications of probability from the accusation of Einstein Insanity to which they are all exposed. If we did have full access to reality, according to this statement, the results of our actions would never be in doubt.

This doctrine, known as determinism, was advocated passionately past the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whom Einstein considered a great hero. But for a better perspective, we need to venture even further dorsum in history.

Parmenides was an influential ancient Greek philosopher, admired by Plato (who refers to "father Parmenides" in his dialogue the Sophist). Parmenides advocated the puzzling view that reality is unchanging and indivisible and that all motility is an illusion. Zeno, a student of Parmenides, devised 4 famous paradoxes to illustrate the logical difficulties in the very concept of motion. Translated into modern terms, Zeno's arrow paradox runs as follows:

1. If you know where an arrow is, you lot know everything about its concrete state.
2. Therefore a (hypothetically) moving arrow has the same concrete country as a stationary pointer in the aforementioned position.
3. The current physical state of an arrow determines its future physical state. This is Einstein Sanity—the denial of Einstein Insanity.
4. Therefore a (hypothetically) moving arrow and a stationary arrow have the same hereafter physical state.
5. The pointer does not move.

Followers of Parmenides worked themselves into logical knots and mystic raptures over the rather blatant contradiction between point five and everyday feel.

The foundational achievement of classical mechanics is to constitute that the outset indicate is faulty. It is fruitful, in that framework, to allow a broader concept of the character of physical reality. To know the state of a system of particles, ane must know not just their positions, simply also their velocities and their masses. Armed with that information, classical mechanics predicts the organisation's future development completely. Classical mechanics, given its broader concept of physical reality, is the very model of Einstein Sanity.

With that triumph in mind, let usa return to the apparent Einstein Insanity of quantum physics. Might that difficulty likewise hint at an inadequate concept of the state of the earth?

Einstein himself idea so. He believed that there must be hidden aspects of reality, not still recognized within the conventional formulation of quantum theory, which would restore Einstein Sanity. In this view information technology is not so much that God does not play dice, merely that the game he's playing does not differ fundamentally from classical die. It appears random, but that's only because of our ignorance of certain "hidden variables." Roughly: "God plays dice, only he's rigged the game."

But as the predictions of conventional quantum theory, free of hidden variables, take gone from triumph to triumph, the wiggle room where one might arrange such variables has go small and uncomfortable. In 1964, the physicist John Bell identified certain constraints that must utilise to whatsoever concrete theory that is both local—meaning that physical influences don't travel faster than light—and realistic, significant that the physical properties of a system exist prior to measurement. Merely decades of experimental tests, including a "loophole-costless" test published on the scientific preprint site arxiv.org last month, show that the world we alive in evades those constraints.

Ironically, conventional breakthrough mechanics itself involves a vast expansion of physical reality, which may exist plenty to avoid Einstein Insanity. The equations of quantum dynamics permit physicists to predict the futurity values of the wave part, given its present value. Co-ordinate to the Schrödinger equation, the wave office evolves in a completely predictable style. Merely in practice nosotros never have admission to the full wave role, either at present or in the future, so this "predictability" is unattainable. If the wave function provides the ultimate description of reality—a controversial consequence!—nosotros must conclude that "God plays a deep nonetheless strictly rule-based game, which looks like die to us."

Einstein'southward not bad friend and intellectual sparring partner Niels Bohr had a nuanced view of truth. Whereas co-ordinate to Bohr, the opposite of a simple truth is a falsehood, the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth. In that spirit, let us innovate the concept of a deep falsehood, whose opposite is likewise a deep falsehood. It seems fitting to conclude this essay with an epigram that, paired with the one nosotros started with, gives a dainty case:

"Naïveté is doing the same affair over and over, and always expecting the same result."

Frank Wilczek was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics for his piece of work on the theory of the strong strength. His about recent book is A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design. Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Mag, an editorially contained publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public agreement of science past covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

Frank Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for his work on the theory of the potent force. Credit: Nick Higgins

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Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/einstein-s-parable-of-quantum-insanity/

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