Description
This video discusses the basic idea of indeterminacy in quantum mechanics. A lot of people think it’s like the weather and we just don’t have enough information or understand the laws behind it yet. However, even if we had all of the data we could want we still wouldn’t be able to predict every event. We can only give the percent chance it would happen.
Discussion Questions
- How is predicting events in quantum mechanics and the weather similar? How are they different?
- Why did scientists assume there was some underlying classical machinery that explained QM?
- Is there? What might it mean if there isn’t?
Keywords: science, determinism, philosophy, quantum mechanics, prediction, scientific method,
The Ethics Video Library 
If the quantum result of A is B 50% of the time, and C 20% of the time, et cetera, then the process is deterministic. If it were truly indeterministic then even a statistical approach would be unviable.
True indeterminism works like this: the quantum result of A is once an aardvark, once a pair of slippers, once a kitten, once a bit of anti-matter, once a new universe, et cetera.
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