Did Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle spell the end of Predestination?

I recently picked up Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek again, after one of my hiatuses on this book which apparently needs hiatuses for me to get through and appreciate it.  In speaking of the elusiveness of nature, she mentions how several physicists have turned mystics after Heisenberg discovered his uncertainty principle.  She says:

The Principle of Indeterminacy […] says in effect that you cannot know both a particle’s velocity and position.  You can guess statistically what any batch of electrons might do, but you cannot predict the career of any one particle.  They seem to be as free as dragon flies.  […]  The Principle of Indeterminacy turned science inside-out.  Suddenly determinism goes, causality goes, and we are left with a universe composed of what Eddington calls, “mindstuff.” […]  Sir James Jeans, Eddington’s successor, […] says that science can no longer remain opposed to the notion of free will.

There are two points on which I’d disagree.

First, random unpredictability is not free will.  From an outside vantage point, they may look identical – something the observer didn’t and wasn’t able to predict took place – but the volitional component crucial to free will is absent from random chance.  And that’s an important distinction, unless we want to define free will as a face-saving circumscription of random chance acting on human neuronal circuits.  If we do that, cow patty bingo is an exercise in free will.

Second, just because a teensy-weensy particle is unpredictable doesn’t mean a large assembly of these particles is unpredictable in any practical sense.  Take a soccer ball, for instance, made up of countless little particles, all inherently indeterminate.  Let’s say we can determine the ball’s position to an accuracy of a nanometer (a hundred millionth of its diameter).  If we assume the ball’s mass is exactly known at 430 grams, then Heisenberg tells us we can’t determine the speed of the ball with any less error than 5 millionths of a nanometer per century.  Close enough, I say, to call it a predictable trajectory, though perhaps Robert Green might reserve the right to disagree.

I’ve heard Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle used similarly as an argument against God’s omniscience.  That makes more sense to me, since the principle states that inherent unpredictability is part of the particles that make up the stuff this world is made of.  The argument seems to me to miss the point, considering that we’re talking about the person that – so the premise goes – created these unpredictable particles, but at least it stays at the particle level.

However, to conclude that I can prove I have free will because the particles making up the atoms I breathe, eat and belch are unpredictable stretches Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle several orders of magnitude and levels of metaphysics beyond what it states.  Predestination and free will are an open debate, on which I believe physics has little to add, even though it may be tempting to recruit this respectable science to bolster my argument.  Let’s put on our philosopher’s or theologian’s cap before delving into the either-ors and both-ands of this argument.

Or call Robert Green.

I’ve accepted a new position of responsibility, though since the negotiations with my wife took 25 hours, we’re currently not so sure about whether we want promotions in the future.  Our new team member is Joseph Andreas, and here’s a picture of him in the arms of Andreas.

I was quite convinced we’d hire a girl, but I think he’ll do his job just fine.  The doc came by our house last night and concurred with the midwife that he’s a healthy little guy with no signs of trouble.  What a miracle!

Let’s face it, pressure ruins poetry.  Poetry needs time to take form, a bit like it takes time for crude oil to form from fossil trees.  It looks to me like the closer I write to the Phi Kappa Phi deadline, the worse the poem.  This issue’s winner, who wrote a slightly modified Villanelle on the topic of recovery and used the form and meter to good effect certainly deserved to win more than I did.  I doubt my submission on the topic of “Scare Tactics” will do any better, written as it was the day of the deadline…

But when has mediocrity kept a blogger from publishing?  Here’s my poem on recovery – yep, an absence of rhymes is a pretty good indicator I didn’t spend enough time on the poem.