This week–

LOOK around you – at the sun

in the sky, a tree swaying in the

breeze, a woman walking her dog

down your street. You may think

all these things have a cause.

Einstein did. He hated the idea of

quantum randomness underlying

everything, which is why he

declared, “God does not play dice”.

Tough, says Stephen Hsu of the

University of Oregon in Eugene.

“Not only does God play dice with

the universe but, if he did not, the

complex universe we see around

us would not exist at all. We owe

everything to randomness.”

Hsu came to his startling

conclusion by comparing the

amount of information in today’s

universe with that in the first

moments of creation. According

to standard cosmology, the

universe grew enormously in the

first split second of its existence,

blowing up from a tiny patch of

vacuum . “Because the patch was

exponentially smaller than

today’s universe, it contained

exponentially less information,”

says Hsu.

He has calculated the size

of the universe before inflation

and before the big bang , and

estimated the maximum amount

of information it could contain.

That space could hold a mere

106 bits of information, he says,

whereas today’s universe requires

at least 1086 bits. “You have to ask

yourself: where did all the

information today come from?”

he says.

Hsu’s answer is that it comes

from quantum randomness.

Quantum theory is our best

description of atoms and

their constituents, and it is a

characteristic feature of quantum

events that they happen

randomly, for no reason at all. For

instance, the spin of an electron is

undetermined until it interacts

with its surroundings. The two

spinstate possibilities, “up” or

“down”, are described by one “bit”

of information, a quantity which

can take on a “0” or “1” to

represent each situation. “With

100 electrons, there is the

possibility of injecting 2100 [or

It’s all down to a roll of the dice MARCUS CHOWN

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sequence of quantum coin tosses

since the end of inflation.”

Think of a leaf fluttering on a

tree. You might think a breeze is

responsible, triggered by heat

dumped in the atmosphere by

the sun, its source, the nuclear

reactions in the solar core, and so

on. “What I’m saying is that, when

you go back far enough, to the

ultimate cause of anything, it’s

a random quantum event,

something which happened

for no reason.”

“Hsu is right – inflation does

involve an exponential expansion

that essentially creates the whole

universe from a little area of space

in which there is little initial

information and quantum theory

rules,” says Nick Evans of the

University of Southampton, UK.

“The diversity we see around

us is created by quantum theory

exploring all possible evolutions

forwards in time from there.” ●

about 1030] bits – a tremendous

amount of information,” says Hsu.

So what processes injected

information into the universe if

the initial state contained hardly

any at all? Hsu points to the

“inflaton” – the unidentified field

or particle which drove the

exponential inflation of the

universe (www.arxiv.org/

abs/0704.1154). The inflaton

existed very early on, when the

universe was cold. When it

decayed its energy went into

creating matter and heating it to

a ferocious temperature – it

created the big bang.

“Like all things quantum, the

inflaton field decayed randomly,

dumping a different amount of

energy into every microscopic

patch of space,” says Hsu. “It was

like a random number generator,

injecting a fantastic amount of

randomness across the length

and breadth of the universe.”

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The decay contributed much

of the information in today’s

universe. But there was another

source too. “Countless quantum

events since the big bang, such as

the random decay of nuclei and

the random emission of photons

by atoms, have contributed yet

more information,” Hsu says.

Interestingly, physicists

used to think that quantum

fluctuations of the inflaton field

provided the seeds which

spawned large-scale structures in

today’s universe, such as galaxy

clusters. Hsu goes even further

than that. “I’m saying that

essentially everything in today’s

universe is the result of a long –Randomness writ large–

“Not only does God play dice

with the universe – if he did

not, the complex universe we

see around us would not exist”

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