Being bored is an average experience that every being deals with. You deal with it, your neighbor deals with it. Heck, even pets deal with it. When this happens, we occupy ourselves with something else, whether it is fidgeting while getting through a lecture, chatting with the person beside you in a line, or anything else. However, one of the best activities to do when you’re bored is think about reality.
One day, I was watching YouTube on my couch when I began to feel bored. After a series of thoughts, I thought about whether or not there was such a thing as fate or not. During that time, we were learning probability in pre-calculus. I then thought about events. Reality is comprised of events. Change during a period of time. Events either will result one way with 100% probability or a range of possibilities with a random percentage chance.
I then connected this with physics. Energy is the ability for an atom to do work, or in my simplified view, the ability for reality to change. This then means that if there was only one atom in the universe, no change would occur and there would be no work. If there were two atoms, then they would cause mutual change to each other. I’m not acquainted well with physics, and so I’m unsure on the nuance of how atoms affect each other. However, I assume that change must come from change, and therefore one molecule must change the other in some way first. Assuming one molecule affects the motion of the second molecule, then there must be some trajectory to the atoms. Let’s say an atom to the left moves straight into an atom on the right. There must be some trajectory to the motion of the atom on the right. However, how do we know which direction that atom will move?
What I realized was that there was either 1 way the atom could move or multiple ways. If there were multiple ways, only one way could actually happen. This means that for each trajectory the atom could take, there is a random possibility of it happening. However, if there is only possible trajectory, this means the atom MUST move in one direction.
This is important because it is the idea that would prove determinism or probabilism. If an atom had a range of possible trajectories to move, and the actual path is dictated by probability, then the universe is probabilistic. If an atom can only be affected in one specific way based on another atom, then the universe is deterministic. It would mean that there is a thing such as a fate.
Eventually, I began to realize that this theory could be part of quantum physics, and that I should research it further. I wanted to know if it was possible to predict the exact trajectory of an atom based off of external forces, and I realized that this was impossible. Here I encountered Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle; it is the idea that the more certain the value of one variable, the less certain the value of the second variable. This is important because we cannot know an atom’s position and its momentum at any one point in time. This is because the models for an atom’s position and its momentum are measured based off of wavelengths. When the wave function for momentum is peaked, the wave function for position is spread out, and vice versa. This model is a probability distribution.
What is important is that this is not necessarily based on human error, but rather a fundamental law of math or nature that prevents us from knowing the exact position and momentum of an atom during one point in time. What is important about this is that it leads many to believe that the universe is probabilistic. Because nature makes the position and momentum of an atom impossible to estimate properly, an atom does not have an exact position or momentum at any time and therefore does not have a set trajectory.
However, a specific theory or branch called Bohmian mechanics is an alternative explanation. Essentially, it states that atoms do in fact have a set trajectory, and that trajectory is guided by its wave functions. This posits that we are simply unable to know the trajectory of an atom because of the nature of the wave functions, not that it doesn’t exist. Of course, this is massive oversimplification.
Whatever the case, this does prove that my original couch theory was pretty close. Essentially, the universe could either be probabilistic or deterministic, even though we can’t prove it. Most quantum physicists don’t go with Bohmian mechanics as an explanation simply because it includes hidden variables and complicates many things, but it doesn’t mean that Bohmian mechanics is wrong. However, I was right in that the universe is ultimately either determined or random.
This is an example of how even simple thoughts about the nature of humanity can lead to something advanced. I didn’t intend to learn quantum physics, but the basic fact that every event in reality has a probability of 100%, 0%, or in between led me to get there. My initial thought process isn’t even complicated- if one object causes the other to move, that motion either has one or multiple possibilities. So, this is why philosophy and thinking is important, because it can lead you to new discoveries.