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Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 1 month agoNot every action needs a cause. Especially when entering the subatomic level, quantum effects appear to be fully probabilistic. Nothing causes the electron to emit a photon exactly then at exactly that energy, it’s just something that happens.
Even at the largest scales, quantum effects have shaped the structure of superclusters of galaxies and in many models underpin the beginning of the universe.
At these extreme ends, the concept of causality gets weaker, and asking “Why?” starts to lose meaning. You could say nothing caused many things, or equally say they happened because they could.
In all cases encountered so far however, learning more has enabled us to identify new limits on possibility, and usually to narrow down on the details. It’s a practically endless series of "why"s that grow ever more exact, until we find the limits of what can be known. Maybe this chain has an end, maybe not, but to claim that science cannot answer any “Why?” is just wrong.
victorz@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I have to say this doesn’t sound very scientific to me.
Science would settle at “it’s just something that happens”? Certainly not the scientist in me, lol. Everything that happens is driven by something, in my mind. Some process. Even if it “appears” probabilistic or whatever. Seems like a probabilistic model is applicable to the behavior, perhaps, but we can’t measure or see such small things so we can’t really make any more detailed models than that. Isn’t that right?
So just because we don’t yet have a model for it or understand it fully, but we can describe it with some model, doesn’t mean we are finished or should stop there, IMO.
It’s like saying the dinosaurs went extinct after the youngest bones we’ve found. Or that they are exactly as old as the oldest bones we’ve found. But, we haven’t found all the dinosaur bones, or at least we can’t know that we have or haven’t. And we definitely haven’t found the bones of those dinosaurs that didn’t leave behind bones.
You feel what I’m getting at, kind of?
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Oh, lots of physicists think the same way! Even Einstein did, nearly a century ago he said “God does not play dice with the universe”, because the popular Copenhagen Interpretation posits that the stochastic quantum wavefunctions are reality, that there is nothing more. Both Pilot Wave Theory and the insane Many Worlds interpretation are attempts at describing quantum mechanics without the inherent randomness, and there are even more less mainstream theories.
Yet even today the Copenhagen Interpretation with it’s wavefunction collapse is still the most widely accepted interpretation among physicists. As of now, there isn’t any evidence for any interpretation, and just the barest logical evidence against some interpretations. We cannot tell even the general direction in which a better theory might be in. So far we can only describe the probability of things happening, and there’s nothing to say we need anything more than that.
Perhaps one day we’ll have discovered that the universe is deterministic and causality makes sense at every scale, but that’s definitely not our current understanding.