"God can't roll the dice" is a famous saying of the famous physicist Einstein. To correctly understand the true meaning of this proposition, we need to go back to the background he put forward. It was the birth and maturity of quantum mechanics in the first half of the twentieth century. Physicists have found that a single measurement of a quantum system can not get accurate results in principle, but only the probability of getting a certain result. For example, if we measure an electron that is not "polarized" in quantum mechanics, the probability of spin can be 1/2, but we can't accurately predict whether the value of electron spin is+1/2 or-1/2.

There are several different explanations for the above-mentioned imprecise predictability or randomness of quantum mechanical measurement. There are two main factions. First of all, most quantum physicists hold the so-called "orthodoxy", or "Copenhagen School". Second, a few unorthodoxs represented by Einstein. Orthodoxy holds that quantum mechanics (including quantum mechanics measurement) has a complete description of microphysical systems. This means that randomness or imprecise predictability is a basic aspect of the objective physical world. Einstein refused to accept this view until his death. He thinks that the description of quantum mechanics is incomplete. The implication is that randomness or imprecise predictability is not the fundamental aspect of the objective physical world, but people's understanding of it is incomplete. "God can't roll the dice" is exactly what Einstein used in religious terms to express his fundamental views on quantum mechanics and the objective physical world.

From the philosophical point of view, the focus of the debate between Einstein and "orthodoxy" is not whether there is order and law in the objective physical world (this is almost the knowledge of all scientists). The key is: is this orderly objective world completely decisive, or does it leave real space for opportunity, development, novelty, human freedom and God's action? Einstein obviously belongs to the former. At this point, he is almost the same as another famous physicist Newton, but contrary to most other quantum physicists.

Einstein's views on quantum mechanics and the objective physical world are closely related to his views on God or religion. Einstein was a theist, but he was not a Christian or a Jew. This is because the God he believes in is a superb mathematician with infinite wisdom, but it is not the God revealed by the Bible or the God believed by Christians. Einstein's god does not eat fireworks, nor will he fall into the world, die on the cross and rise from the dead for human sins, so that all believers will not perish, but will live forever.

Hawking-completely excluded God from the affairs of the universe.

"The universe has a beginning? So what happened before we started? Does the universe have no beginning? How can there be no beginning? " Since the beginning of mankind, he has given an answer that is perhaps the closest to the truth so far.

Hawking1942 65438+/KLOC-0 was born in Oxford, England on October 8th. This day happens to be the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death. At a cosmological conference held in Vatican, Pope Paul II told the delegates that it is ok to study the universe after it begins, but we should not explore the beginning itself, because it concerns God. "I'm glad he doesn't know that I just published a paper at the meeting, proposing how the universe began." Hawking sounded smug. "I don't want to be sent to the Inquisition like Galileo."

Hawking was not sent to the Inquisition, but his research was enough to keep him on a par with Galileo in the history of science.

"Hawking is the greatest theoretical physicist in the field of gravitational physics after Einstein." Professor Wu of Zhejiang University of Technology, who received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University under Hawking's guidance, told us that the black hole theory perfectly unified quantum theory and thermodynamics in Hawking's radiation, and his quantum cosmology with no boundary hypothesis in the 1980s solved the "first push" problem that puzzled the scientific community for hundreds of years.

Hawking's greatness lies in his realization that time can be understood as human's understanding of the edge of the earth. "Where is the southernmost tip of the earth? At the South Pole. So where is the further south of the South Pole? This question is meaningless because there is nothing in' South of the Antarctic'. "

Recognizing this problem is actually a very meaningful thing. "In this way, he completely excluded God from the affairs of the universe."