The Destruction of The Cosmos

“I, at any rate, am convinced that He [God] does not throw dice.”

When Einstein wrote these words to his contemporary, Max Born, in 1926 it was an expression of conviction in the face of a bizarre new era for Physics. Where once the laws of Physics had been predictable or orderly, Quantum Physics had come to demonstrate a potential which was unprecedented in science: the universe may be, at its very base, entirely random.

Science had dealt with randomness before, through statistics and probability, but these mathematical techniques treated events only as apparently random and not actually random. Even if math was used to treat things as random they could still be thought of as fundamentally orderly. The “cosmos” could still be conserved.

By 1926, however, quantum mechanics was posing a vital threat to this theory and already Physicists were waking up to the realisation that the cosmic order assumed by science was under threat. Attempts to explain the behaviour of very small events, quantum particles, in a predictable and causal manner were failing and, to everyone’s disbelief, the only accounts which could explain quantum behaviour were statistical and probabilistic. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle demonstrated the unknowable and random behaviour of electrons and the correspondence principle stipulated that even at larger scales there is still a degree of uncertainty and randomness. Still, despite the staggering randomness of quantum theories, Einstein continued his firm belief in the cosmic order of physics and throughout his life sought out a way of resolving these uncertainties.

Wavefunctions of the electron in a hydrogen atom at different energy levels. Due to the apparently random behaviour of quantum particles, quantum mechanics cannot predict the exact location of a particle in space, only the probability of finding it at different locations.

Unfortunately, Einstein was not successful. The signs all seemed to be pointing the same way, and they all pointed to one deeply troubling reality: God really does play dice with the universe.

Einstein was not the only opponent of this new theory, nor was he the last. Many physicists, mathematicians and philosophers believe, to this day, that quantum randomness is merely illusory, a trick caused by a lack of data. Regardless of their efforts, however, quantum mechanics have irreversibly shaken science to its core. What had been considered a basic and fundamental scientific assumption that the universe was predictable, that it could be totally understood, had been deeply undercut and the sacred and ancient principle of the cosmos, a place where things are orderly and causally related, had been desecrated by doubt and tainted forever. The cosmos had been destroyed.

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