How does it make sense that there’s a difference at the quantum level and then afterward it evens out? If everything is random, how does it balance out on larger scales?!

Also,
I see that an electron is half of a micron 10^-15, and an atom is also less than a micron 10^-12,
and likewise a basic molecule. So a sufficient number of random occurrences would be enough to mess up the amino acid. And in every living cell there are about 20 amino acids.

Surely you’ll forgive me if I don’t give a course here in physics and statistics. There are many things that seem illogical to someone who doesn’t understand the field, and that’s only natural.

Okay, if the scientist says so.

Is this agreed on by everyone, in any case? Because I saw, for example regarding free choice, that Karl Popper tries to build on the randomness of quantum mechanics.

No. There are people who wanted to hang free choice on quantum mechanics. I explained in an article and in a book why they are mistaken. But everyone agrees that if there are many random occurrences, that reduces their effect rather than increases it (the law of large numbers).

Obviously one can’t say that the mechanism of free choice is quantum, but if it were at the level of quantum processes that would mean there is no determinism there, and then one could argue that there is free choice there and not randomness, but that this free choice cannot be observed empirically (you can observe that the distribution of the behavior is as if random, but that is true anyway). Since that is not the case, free choice forces one to believe that it is observable at some level, meaning that with sufficiently sophisticated means it would be possible to see activity in the brain that occurs against the laws of physics. It seems to me that this is what “there were some who wanted” were trying to achieve, but as you said, apparently it doesn’t work because neurons are too large.

Not exactly. If it were on the relevant scale, that would be randomness, but randomness too is not free choice. The distribution determines the result. If that were the case, then in principle quantum theory would collapse, because the results would not be distributed according to what it determines but according to people’s choices.

Indeed, Rabbi, quantum theory can affect biological scales, it seems, according to the Davidson Institute. Like mutations. And not according to the Rabbi’s approach.
Who is right? ;)?

Moshe
Fri, 08/18/2017 – 11:03

…Could it be that the scales of quantum mechanics can cause such changes [regarding abiogenesis/mutations]?
Or are the scales of randomness much smaller, such that they could affect abiogenesis/mutations at all? (with a reasonable probability, without finding Schrödinger’s cat or a ball passing through the wall)…

Avi Saig
Sun, 08/20/2017 – 09:20
I passed it on

Hi Moshe, I passed your question on to Dr. Yossi Elran—who is a much bigger expert than I am in the field of quantum mechanics (which he researches to this day). This is the answer he wrote to me (I don’t know whether it will satisfy you 🙂 )
“In principle, quantum phenomena on a minuscule scale בהחלט do affect macro scales. For example, particle-wave duality together with the collapse of the wave function under observer intervention are responsible for the observed results (in our world!) of Young’s experiment. Quantum mechanics explains the spectrum of all materials, etc.
Of course, this is a philosophical question: what is the difference between an ‘explanation’ and a ‘cause’?
It is certainly possible that a possible explanation for the phenomenon of mutation on the biological scale has its source in quantum mechanics. But, as stated, it is also possible that not, and such an explanation has not yet been found. The remark is correct for every unexplained phenomenon in the world, so it does not really have much meaning…"

http://davidson.weizmann.ac.il/online/askexpert/chemistry/%D7%9E%D7%94%20%D7%9E%D7%94%D7%95%D7%AA%20%D7%94%D7%A7%D7%A9%D7%A8%20%D7%94%D7%9B%D7%99%D7%9E%D7%99%20%D7%A2%D7%9C%20%D7%A4%D7%99%20%D7%AA%D7%A4%D7%99%D7%A1%D7%AA%20%D7%9E%D7%9B%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%AA%20%D7%94%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%98%D7%99%D7%9D%3F%20%D7%90%D7%A8%D7%99

What does the Rabbi think?

With all due respect, this is a misunderstanding. Of course we see quantum phenomena on the macroscopic scale (like the spectrum of materials, semiconductor phenomena, and the like). What we do not see are phenomena of randomness or uncertainty like in the two-slit experiment.
Young’s experiment is in optics to begin with. Its parallel in electrons deals with single electrons, which is a small enough scale, and therefore there one really does see quantum uncertainty (and even there, only if one goes down to tiny distance resolutions). Beyond that, in a Young-like experiment the experimenter prepares the system in a very deliberate and sophisticated way in order to obtain the quantum result. That can happen with Schrödinger’s cat too, since there as well one prepares a laboratory experiment by means of human beings who work very, very hard at it (and usually still won’t succeed). But to say that in processes that occur naturally at room temperature without a guiding hand there are quantum phenomena of uncertainty is, in my opinion, devoid of any theoretical or practical basis (except for superfluids and conductors, and those two exceptions also occur at much lower temperatures). To the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing.

I saw today that an answer was received on the matter:

“The answer in the body of the theory
Quantum theory deals with the interesting phenomena that occur in the very tiny world, and therefore obviously one has to look at the very tiny world in order to see them. That is also why the theory was only created in the 20th century, when measuring devices had developed sufficiently to see all sorts of strange phenomena. As stated, even the color of materials heated in fire (the spectrum of materials) is a quantum phenomenon that projects onto the larger world; atomic clocks in practice operate on a quantum phenomenon—and again are measured in the macro world, the large one. As for phenomena of statistical quantum uncertainty—which occur at room temperature without human touch—there certainly are: for example, in ammonia gas, the shape of the molecule is something like an umbrella or a pyramid, and it constantly undergoes inversion—like an umbrella turning inside out in the wind. According to classical energy calculations—it should not do this, the energy barrier is too great, but the nitrogen atom undergoes quantum tunneling from side to side between the two stable states. This is a probabilistic quantum process: a particle that passes through a ‘wall’ / barrier that it should not be able to pass through at all, with a certain probability in some of the collisions. See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_inversion
Again, to measure this you need sophisticated equipment, but there is no experiment here with restrictive conditions carried out by a human being, but rather a natural quantum phenomenon that occurs all the time without human intervention or planning at room temperature. (So this closes the point ‘whether quantum phenomena of uncertainty occur at room temperature without a guiding hand’).
Regarding implications of uncertainty for the macro world: I personally heard several years ago in a lecture from an Israeli scientist about one such case: the lecture was actually about pulses of short lasers. That is, a laser that works for a short fraction of a second (a picosecond—one trillionth, and even a femtosecond—one quadrillionth), now a laser is supposed to emit a single very pure wavelength (light in only one color) — and that is indeed the case, but the moment they went down to short pulses they noticed a strange phenomenon: as if the laser had ‘broken down’ and started emitting a broad collection of wavelengths (say—not only green, but also a bit of yellow and blue). And the reason is quantum: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which suddenly comes into play. The moment the pulse becomes short in time, it necessarily becomes broad in energy (expressed in the emission of many wavelengths).
Best regards,
Dr. Avi Saig
Davidson Institute for Science Education
Weizmann Institute of Science

"

We keep returning again and again to irrelevant examples. I mentioned in my remarks phenomena of superfluids and conductors.
I haven’t checked the example of ammonia gas, but it seems to me that it is produced by the Haber-Bosch process, which is a carefully controlled process carried out by human beings. The same applies to the laser pulses. We are talking about a very tightly controlled process that lives for a very short time (and I assume at temperatures far from room temperature). You won’t escape that.
Beyond that, he himself says that in order to measure it you need very sophisticated equipment. Did the Grants, who measured the elongation of finch beaks in the Galápagos, use particle accelerators? This bizarre comparison is completely absurd.

You referred me to Wikipedia. See what they write there about ammonia gas:

For nitrogen inversion to occur:

• the nitrogen atom must have one lone pair, and
• both isomers must not be under significant strain
  (or at least their strain is comparable)

As every physicist knows, a macroscopic quantum phenomenon requires a very large correlation range between the microscopic degrees of freedom. Such a range does not arise on its own naturally. It simply does not happen, certainly not at room temperatures, which destroy that coherence, and certainly not without human intervention.
But all this is also unimportant, because even if you find such a case (and meanwhile, as far as I know, no one has found one), anyone who claims that all the evolution around us is the result of quantum randomness does not know what he is talking about. People search for randomness with candles, and invest billions to produce it in the laboratory (like Schrödinger’s cat experiment), certainly not at room temperature. According to the writer’s approach, this randomness appears all the time throughout the world around us, from the finch’s beak to the lizard’s tail (sizes much larger than a single cell, and certainly than a single molecule). Schrödinger’s cats surround us on every side and we didn’t notice. This is completely absurd. I must say that this fantasy is based on speculation far greater than the speculation about the existence of a Creator (since we already spoke about celestial teapots): for the second thesis there is no scientific indication, but for the first all the scientific indications say that it is impossible and does not exist. Wondrous are the ways of atheist apologetics.

Let me just add one more thing: I am not making a god-of-the-gaps argument, meaning the existence of God from a gap in scientific understanding. The physico-theological argument remains valid even if a scientific explanation is found for the entire evolutionary process. Therefore this whole discussion is irrelevant on the essential plane. In other words, this is a scientific dispute, not a theological one.