God Doesn’t Play Dice. But What About Poker?

Albert Einstein hated… hated… hated quantum mechanics because he said he didn’t believe that God plays dice.

Which brings up the obvious question: what does Einstein have against dice? It’s a perfectly fun game. Did he get ripped off in a back alley craps game? Did he just have bad luck, or dislike cubed objects? The questions are tantalizing.

Anyways, maybe God doesn’t play dice. I think he may use decoherence in a eternal probabilistic game of poker.

Perhaps it’s one way to shuffle the deck and divvy out the next hand? It’s a far more apt description than shaking up the dice. Poker, after all, requires an interaction with the cards to determine a hand. You can bluff. And seek new combinations. Pass and wait for a better hand. There’s some strategy, after all. Dice is more–what you see is what you get.

That would be a far more satisfying–to me, at least–compromise in the determinism and indeterminism debate. In a perfectly deterministic universe, there would be no surprise at all. And how fun would that be? A totally indeterministic universe would be chaotic. I like to call it Parking Lot Physics. Have you ever been in a WalMart parking lot during the holidays. Where is your God there?

But there seems to be evidence for a third way–a mixture of surprise and skill–that drives our universe.

We have a mixture of entanglement and decoherence. Of superposition and shuffling. Of order and entropy.

But whose shuffling the deck? Whose shaking the dice?

That’s for another day.

Entanglement and Upper Orders of Entanglement

Caution: the following is probably wrong. Worse, it probably isn’t even useful. But I thought that I would write it down in case there’s a germ of an idea that may be somewhat correct, and perhaps somewhat useful.

The success of quantum computing is tied to the mastering of entanglement. When two particles are entangled, they are deeply correlated.

For example: If the polarity of one photon is changed, the polarity of its entangled partner is changed identically.The same things happens to electrons, or any particle that becomes entangled.

Freakishly, this can occur at great distances, even across the universe. Welcome to non-locality, destination everywhere.

However, when this entanglement is lost, the particles are said to be in a state of decoherence.

The question arises: how does non-locality suddenly end?

My mind experiment… my philosophical step off the ledge is this: Let’s say entanglement does not end when particles are no longer entangled; they are, in fact, still entangled but in an advanced form, or dimension, of entanglement. This is entanglement on the universal order and gives us the smear of probabilistic behaviors, although the connection is still within the particles. The essence of non-locality holds even in this state.

The state awaits the interaction of an observer to uncouple the universal state.

Think about it as grass, or, in the case of my own lawn, weeds. You may pull a few blades out, but the roots remain. The pulled blades, in this case, are the classically entangled blades. The roots are the upper orders of entanglement. However, now think that when you put the blades back down on the lawn, they instantly reconnect.

As I write this, it does sound Bohmian. Maybe this is just another version of the implicate, explicate order?