Sunday, February 12, 2012

Thoughts on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle


Think of the perfect chess game. It's out there- if you examined every possible combination of moves, there would be a single game of perfect chess. It could end in one player winning every time, or it would end in a draw every time.

If this game were ever discovered, chess would die. It would no longer be interesting anymore. Chess would become tic-tac-toe, in which perfect play on both sides results in the same conclusion every time.

Now think of the universe. If we could hyper examine the physics of everything down to the most minute detail, we could write laws which describe the order of the universe completely. With enough computing power, the universe would turn into the perfect game of chess- perfectly analyzed, nothing unexpected, no more fun, no more excitement. The universe would turn into tic-tac-toe.

Fortunately for us, a guy named Heisenberg came along and discovered something known as the uncertainty principle. The uncertainty principle dictates that there is a fundamental limit placed upon the accuracy with which we can know certain pairs of properties of particles (for example, position and momentum). Because of this, we cannot create a perfect model of our universe, and cannot predict based on physics what the future will be like.

If our universe is the creation of God, he made the universe interesting. He created a world which can never be turned into the perfect game of chess, nor the boring monotony of consecutive games of tic-tac-toe. He made a universe which will never, ever cease to surprise us.