The world at the scale of the atoms and beyond is strange. The brightest human minds have been baffled with the behavior of physical entities on such scales. The seemingly intrinsic random behavior of electrons and atoms was confusing to Einstein. How could an electron change its state totally randomly and without any obvious cause? This was not a world that he could imagine based on his religious teachings. He frustratingly said once: “God does not play dice”!
But he was wrong. Nature turns out to be playing dice at least at small scales. Prior to Quantum Mechanics people were familiar with random phenomena. Clearly no one could with certainty predict the outcome of a coin toss. But the difficulty to predict that outcome was not the result of an intrinsic randomness in nature but a result of our ignorance. Ideally one could calculate the outcome of a coin toss by considering all the forces involved and solving the Newton equation. However in the case of an electron or other elementary particles no amount of information would do away with randomness.
Other bizarre aspects of quantum phenomena are passing of an electron through two holes (side by side and few millimeters apart) simultaneously, being at two places same time and penetration through the barriers (that would be like a ball passing through a concrete wall). Human mind cannot fathom such mysteries.
This brings up a very important issue. Should we be surprised or even upset as Einstein was when facing with exotic worlds such as the subatomic world? Do we have such a right or entitlement to know the world as it is? The right that is given to us let’s say by God?! Or we are given no such rights or guarantees to discover the secrets of nature and understand it as it is?!
One can approach this question from at least two different points of views. If one believes in stories of scriptures and the claim that we are created by God and on his own image and furthermore the God created the whole world for our sake, then clearly we should expect to be able to understand the world and reach the ultimate truth. From this vantage point the current language of Quantum Mechanics is not acceptable and hence the Einstein frustration.
However there is another point of view, that of evolution theory. Based on theory of evolution we are descendants of organisms that have survived and evolved by having being better adapted to their immediate environment than those who didn’t lived long to have descendents. Our brain is nothing but an organ that is a product of this adaptation and natural selection. As such our brain is a tool for survival as opposed to being a tool for discovering the “truth”!
The brain was evolved to help us navigate for food and avoid the predators. The environment that the brain evolved in, as far as the dimension, speed and other properties are concerned is what’s called the middle world. As such our brain would find the other two extremes, the Macro cosmos (Galaxies and beyond) and micro cosmos (atom and beyond) unfamiliar territories.
No one could perhaps better explain this that one of the most brilliant minds of 20th century Richard Feynman in this video.
