Originally shared by Ethan Siegel
Proof Of ‘God Playing Dice With The Universe’ Found In The Sun’s Interior
“If it weren’t for the quantum nature of every particle in the Universe, and the fact that their positions are described by wavefunctions with an inherent quantum uncertainty to their position, this overlap that enables nuclear fusion to occur would never have happened. The overwhelming majority of today’s stars in the Universe would never have ignited, including our own. Rather than a world and a sky alight with the nuclear fires burning across the cosmos, our Universe would be desolate and frozen, with the vast majority of stars and solar systems unlit by anything other than a cold, rare, distant starlight.
It’s the power of quantum mechanics that allows the Sun to shine. In a fundamental way, if God didn’t play dice with the Universe, the nuclear flame that powers the stars would never light, and the life-giving fusion that occurs in our Sun’s core would never come to be. Yet with this randomness, we win the cosmic lottery all the time, to the continuous tune of hundreds of Yottawatts of power. Thanks to the fundamental quantum uncertainty inherent in the Universe, we’ve achieved a chance at existence. Fiat lux.”
Inside the nuclear furnace of the Sun, protons and other atomic nuclei are compressed together into a tiny region of space, where the incredible temperatures and energies try to overcome the repulsive forces of their electric charges. At a maximum temperature of 15 million K, and with a long-tailed (Poisson) distribution of energies at the highest end, we can compute how many protons are energetic enough to overcome the Coulomb barrier, interact with one another, and wind up in a more tightly-bound, fused state. That number, if you do that calculation, turns out to be exactly zero. When you consider that 95% of stars are less massive and reach lower core temperatures than our Sun, the situation appears to be even more dire. If there were no quantum mechanics, nuclear fusion would be an impossibility. Yet we’re saved by a feature of quantum indeterminism, where spread-out wavefunctions can overlap, and nuclear fusion as we know it can proceed.
If Einstein and Bohr knew how the Sun worked, they could have settled the question of whether “God plays dice” with the Universe once and for all. Find out the answer today!