Getting a couple of (difficult) things straight

To return to physics, let me first state again that my expertise is that of a life-long reader of Scientific American and a reader of a few books written for otherwise well educated lay people. That said, I do understand quite a lot about the substantive and philosophical implications of contemporary physical and cosmological theory.The quantum theory does not admit the possibility of miracles. Events at unimaginably small scales -- measured in picometers, that is 10^-12 meters, i.e. 1/1,000,000,000,000 meter -- are probabilistic rather than deterministic. That is, we can only say that the probability of a neutron in a radioactive nucleus decaying within a certain time is so much, but we can ' t predict when it will actually decay. We also cannot predict when an " excited " electron -- one at a higher than normal energy state in an atom -- will fall back to its lower state and emit a photon, but only the probability of it happening within a certain time. There are many other non-deterministic processes. However, when you put together millions of atoms to make objects that we can interact with in our macroscopic world, including ourselves, all of those probabilities add up to a definite and fully predictable reality. We know how billiard balls will bounce off of each other, and we know we can ' t walk through walls, even though we can ' t predict exactly how subatomic particles will interact or whether they will " tunnel " through a higher energy state to a lower one. New...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs