250 Words on the Odds

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]

Studying quantum physics* taught me that reality is a crapshoot.

Electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. aren’t tiny marbles that orbit and ricochet off each other. That old Bohr atomic model was obsolete a century ago. Instead, each is a nebulous cloud of space that has an extremely high probability of behaving like an electron, proton or neutron. It could also behave like a donut. The odds are never 100 percent, and whenever you try to pin one down it squirms away.

Einstein said, “God does not play dice with the universe,” but the science says She does. We are all the consequence of trillions of individual subatomic dice throws happening every picosecond of our lives. 

Those probabilities can be expressed as a wave function, like an enormous squiggly curve, just as throwing two dice produces a bell curve that peaks on the number seven. Electrons, protons and neutrons are all wave functions and we are the sum—the superposition—of all the probability waves that comprise us. I’m a wave, you’re a wave. Hello, my wave is waving to your wave.

In 1763, writer, editor, and lexicographer Samuel Johnson answered a philosophical argument that nothing truly exists by kicking a large stone as hard as he could and declaring, “I refute it thus!”

All Johnson proved was that the odds of his and the stone’s wave functions occupying the same space at the same time were vanishingly small. Whether that says anything about the reality of their mutual existence is debatable. 

* I don't assume that all my friends and readers know I got my bachelor's degree in physics, so I have actually studied quantum mechanics. I did some time in Hilbert Space. That in no way makes me an expert—mostly it taught me exactly how ignorant I was—but I think it does make me better informed than most. Also, this footnote does not count against my 250-word limit, a loophole I may exploit in the future!