The Crack in the Determinist's Egg 


A reflection on the limits of cause and effect thinking, pointing to a dimension of freedom in our experience. 

Thirty-five years ago, Joseph Chilton Pearce wrote these lines in the introduction to his book, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: "Our cosmic egg is the sum total of our notions of what the world is, notions which define what reality can be for us. The crack, then, is a mode of thinking through which imagination can escape the mundane shell and create a new cosmic egg." Pearce's book and others with similar thoughts eventually put a crack in my deterministic model of the universe.

It's pretty clear that there are laws governing the universe. We used to do experiments in my freshman college qualitative chemistry lab that pretty much convinced me of this. I remember heating potassium chlorate in a test tube to show its decomposition into oxygen and salt substitute (KCl) in 1956. Students are doing similar experiments still today. Lots of things behave predictably under carefully controlled conditions, computers, rockets to the moon, and fractionated petroleum. But if you don't get the initial conditions just right, all sorts of unpredictable results may occur.

Now the determinist's fervent hope is that any unpredictability that results in events is only due to our lack of information or resources to control the initial conditions. That is the old view of the universe: it's just like a big clock, wound up at the beginning and running smoothly, all gears and cogs connected. It is a model of the universe that guided much of scientific investigation since the time of Isaac Newton, and even before that, one that led to an enormous list of laws governing things.

Ironically, in the 20th Century, it was because of thinking about and attempting to measure the very big and the very small that scientists were eventually led to see this way of looking at things as of only limited usefulness.

Take, for example, trying to measure the velocity and position of a very small particle, say about the size of the unit of light, a photon. The man, Werner Heisenberg, articulated his uncertainty principle about 1925. He pointed out that to measure the position of a small particle, one had to observe it, and that meant using light or at least some form of electromagnetic radiation. Observation involves recording the light that bounces off of a particle to determine its position. However, once we know the position of a particle using this form of measurement, we loose track of its velocity, since light too has mass, and the impact of that mass on the particle changes its velocity in unpredictable ways. The uncertainty principle says that we may know the position OR the velocity of a particle through measurement, but not both simultaneously. There is, in effect, a systematic uncertainty built into the measurement of small particles.

But there is even more news about the very small that is unsettling to the clockwork universe model—our very notion of what a particle is got transformed. Eventually, physicists like Schrödinger developed models of small particles that described not what they looked like, but rather, the probability that they would be found in such and such a place at a given time. Electrons "looked like" clouds, but not like any clouds we see on this earth. They were clouds not of actual particles, but rather of possible positions of the SAME particle. According to these models, there is an infinitesimally small but finite possibility that an electron might be anywhere at a given time. They might be anywhere, that is, even though their likely location is much more circumscribed.

Einstein gained some of his fame for his thinking about the very large. Locally (meaning here on Earth), Euclidian geometry works just fine. Start to measure distances between Earth's sun and other stars, however, and it appears that a different kind of geometry is in order, one that seems counterintuitive to common sense. For example, at these great distances, given a straight line and a point not on that line, more than one straight line can be drawn through the given point, which lines are parallel to the given line. Try it with an earth-built clock sometime: clock geometry, Euclidian.

Equally surprising was Einstein's posit that the speed of light is constant no matter how fast one is traveling relative to that light. A little careful thought leads to the conclusion that whatever the nature of light, it is something very different from an earthbound object, whose speed varies with the speed of reference of the observation point. Clock parts certainly don't behave in this way, so once again, the analogy of the universe as a clock fails.

Probably the most shocking experiment of the 20th Century was done by Alan Aspect in 1982 for Bell Labs. It settled a long-standing debate which started between Einstein and Podolsky and Rosen. Because quantum mechanics painted such a non-clockwork picture of the universe, Einstein felt that the theory was incomplete. He died still believing that there was still a deeper, unexplored level of the universe that did run like clockwork. In sequence, Podolsky and Rosen, John Bell, and Alan Aspect showed that Einstein was wrong about that.

The assumption Einstein wanted to make is technically referred to as the assumption of locality throughout the universe. In common sense terms, if I clap my hands somewhere on Earth, this doesn't instantaneously cause an event to occur on the other side of the Earth without some intervening chain of events. To put it in other common sense terms, denying locality seems tantamount to affirming some sort of magic. In the end, however, the experiment done by Aspect showed that there are in fact pairs of subatomic particles that are somehow "entangled" in just this mysterious way. Jiggle one particle of such a pair, and the other one will instantly jiggle, even if it is remote in space and time from the first particle.

All these different lines of thinking and experimenting have converged to replace the clock-work model of the universe with something more nearly akin to a spider web. At least at the level of subatomic particles, and possibly at every day sizes, everything seems to be connected, mysteriously, to everything else.

In conclusion, one could say that it has taken most of the 20th Century for intellectual life to absorb these facts about the limited validity of the mechanical model for the universe. If, in fact, there are remote, "hidden" variables for every subatomic event, it seems much less certain that every event could be predicted if we only knew all the variables. Oh, there will still be the hordes of logical empiricists pointing to the huge body of physical laws that science has accumulated, and saying that these quantum theoretic consequences are of no consequence to our everyday life. But that seems to me to be a bit like the naive realist who kicks the rock to prove that it is really there (and possibly hurts his toe in the process). It misses the point.

Finally, I'll leave you with just this thought. It is we, the experimenters, who arrange the initial conditions for our experiments so that they will not fail. It is sheerest metaphysical speculation to propose that we, too, in all of our complexity, can be exhibited as the end of a chain of cause and effect. To those with such a metaphysical position, I simply say, "Show me. It is counter to my intuitive experience that my actions are entirely determined." 

Posted: Sun - April 2, 2006 at 04:37 PM          

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