June 18th, 2009

Text Ticker: Weird news for free will

Something pretty crazy I just learned about:

In 2004, Conway and Simon Kochen, another Princeton mathematician, proved the Free will theorem, a startling version of the No Hidden Variables principle of Quantum Mechanics. It states that given certain conditions, if an experimenter can freely decide what quantities to measure in a particular experiment, then elementary particles must be free to choose their spins in order to make the measurements consistent with physical law. In Conway’s provocative wording: “if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles”.

John Horton Conway – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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