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Richard Walker

The Thanksgiving Chapel

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While reading the WikiQuote entry for Niels Bohr I came across a striking picture of the stained glass windows in the spire of the Thanksgiving chapel in Dallas.


This chapel is open to people of all faiths or none and is in Thanks-Giving Square, which was dedicated in 1976.

Image credit: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/

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Richard Walker

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As in “God does not place dice”?

I think it’s very hard to know what genuine randomness means. It might be impossible for any finite intelligence to predict which of a collection of radioactive atoms will be the next to decay, and yet we might still believe, as I think Einstein did, that deep down the process is deterministic. But if that knowledge is for some reason fundamentally inaccessible to us then aren’t the atoms behaving in a genuinely random way?

This is a book I am currently reading and I think it’s interesting

https://amzn.eu/gU0iMPg


Richard Walker

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There are many systems where individual items are effectively random but the macro effect highly predictable. I'm thinking of examples like gas molecules in a container and the relationship between volume, temperature, and pressure.