by Orri Avraham

Created on: February 02, 2007   Last Updated: May 15, 2007

In their legendary debate over the theory of physical determinism, Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein shook fists and tables as they contended for dominion over the universe and the answers to its underlying mysteries. Bohr was thoroughly convinced that, in spite of the proven predictability of the limited physical processes known to man, at the atomic and subatomic levels interactions remain entirely random even in the theoretical sense; "as unpredictable as a roll of dice." Einstein, weary of his companion's intransigence, plainly replied "God does not play dice."

Brilliant though he was, Bohr had indeed failed to recognize a truth as self-evident as the setting of the sun and as fundamental as any scientific principle if not more so. So long as there are laws, constant at any point in time and space, the effects they produce will remain ever constant and thus unfalteringly foreseeable. One plus one are two today; they will be so tomorrow; and they will be so the moment existence finally comes to its abrupt end.

This reality often tends to elude us (evidently, even Niels Bohr) because we are inclined to dismiss what we find hard to reason as simply unanswerable to reason altogether. When one makes the first strike on a pool table, for instance, the wild anarchy of the balls is almost impossible to process; the spot at which each eventually stops seems entirely arbitrary to the naked eye. But if given the necessary information regarding the initial conditions of the first hit the speed and direction of the strike, the mass of the balls, and the angle at which the white ball collides with the rest the iron laws of physics would allow us to predict the seemingly unpredictable and determine precisely where each ball will end up. Even Bohr's analogy involving dice, in fact, is inaccurate, since dice, like the billiard balls, answer to science. So long as the axioms are constant, the answers will follow suit.

Once this has been asserted, determinism need not be confined to the practical realm. As Isenberg's uncertainty principle tells us, we will never be able to determine the exact conditions inside an atom at any single point in time, leaving us unable to make a precise prediction because we lack the initial information necessary to formulate it. To this end, Niels Bohr had been accurate. But simply because we cannot logistically do so does not disprove the logical assertion that anything and everything is hypothetically predictable. The rules stay the same; we simply

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