Gary,

Seems like I'm always trying to figure this puzzle out -- i.e., the one we live in.

Last Sunday, mid November, the 15th, was a beautiful fall day, warm, mid 70s, with nice colors. I mobilized my butt to walk a mile or so to the Whole Foods on River Road. Went by way of the Crescent Trail, which runs from Silver Spring to Georgetown and passes a block from my house. And on the way I had an insight into how to integrate quantum indeterminacy with Newtonian determinism in a way that the Laws of Motion are still strictly applicable.

Being such a warm and colorful day, the Trail was packed with hikers and bikers. Never seen it so dense. I had the most recent issue of Science in which I recall having read and considered an article about the genetic basis of a type of hemophilia that affected English and Russian royalty of the 19th century. Seems some folks found some Romanov remains which they subjected to various methods so as to reveal that Queen Victoria -- who was ancestral to Empress Alexandra and her son Alexei, in whom, being male, the negative effects of the problem were manifest -- had a single "A-to-G intronic mutation located three base pairs upstream of exon 4" blah, blah, blah, the point being that a certain blood-clotting protein was not just defective but not even being produced. "A" is adenine, and "G" is guanine, as per this:

As you might recall, a sequence of three RNA base pairs specify a specific amino acid and is a codon, as per this from Wikipedia:

Each three-base-pair codon specifies a specific amino acid molecule in a protein polymer, or polypeptide.

In the case of this royal hemophilia, however, this A-to-G mutation caused the genetic reading sequence to shift by one unit, so that the "reading" of the codons beyond that point specified the wrong amino acids, ones that did not assemble into the proper blood-clotting protein. Hence His Serene Highness had blood that would not clot.

So I was walking down the Crescent Trail so as to get some Roquefort at the Whole Foods and thinking about the amazing precision and specificity that seem reliably to underlie our existences over long periods, all of which seems rigidly deterministic.

Related to this, as I should mention as background for what follows, I have been heavy into, and am nearing the end of, 'War and Peace' wherein Count Tolstoy asserts in Chapter 1 of Part I of Volume III that wars and human affairs generally are predetermined at the beginning of time. Here specifically, from the Briggs translation, is what is written: "Every action [that human beings] perform, which they take to be self-determined and independent, is in a historical sense quite the opposite; it is interconnected with the whole course of history, and predetermined from eternity."

When W&P was written, roughly over the middle part of the 19th century, Newtonian determinism was all the rage. It is something I have thought about a lot -- until, that is, the news of quantum mechanics and the associated probabalism finally arrived in my sector, mostly by way of Feynman's lecture/essay "QED," wherein he describes the interactions of photons with electrons and the role of probability in the analyses of such things as the transmission of light through glass. For example, if a bunch of photons arrive perpendicular to a sheet of glass, ~98 percent of them go into the glass and while some smaller portion get reflected at the surface or absorbed; which photons will be transmitted, reflected or absorbed cannot be specifically determined beforehand, but probabilities can be assigned.

In my reading of Feynman's accounting of an interaction of a photon and an electron, the electron absorbs the photon for a finite period, a moment, brief by our standards, say on the order of 10E-30 second, then re-emits another photon. Here's a Feynman diagram of such an interaction,

showing the electron (e) moving in space and time and a first photon (ph1) hitting it at time 1 and then a second photon being re-emitted at time 2. This sketch shows the electron not moving in space between time 1 and time 2, which is happenstance, simply what I picked off Google Images; the momentum of the ph1 gets transferred to the electron, causing its motion to change, and likewise there is a recoil at time 2 when the second photon, ph2, gets re-emitted, all in accordance with conservation of momentum, as per Newton. Feynman says this sequence can run equally well forward or backward in time (with the electron being, from our point of view, a positron), but the relevant point in this present comment relates to the probabilistic part of this sequence, which is the time interval between 1 and 2.

So I was walking down the Crescent Trail thinking about royal hemophilia, Tolstoy, Roquefort, determinism, probabilism, Newton and the laws of motion, while trying to find therein a loophole by which free will can exist, and that is when I realized that the world can be deterministic in a Newtonian sense while at the same time it can be indeterminate because of quantum probabilism: i.e., in the electron- photon interaction depicted above, that time interval is indeterminate. Here's an example on a macro-scale: You get out of your car on a hill, forgetting to put it in Park, and it rolls down the street in accordance with Newton, but . . . well, bad example, because the car would have to stop suddenly or roll faster. The point is this: On an atomic or nuclear scale of things, two events can happen in accordance with the Laws of Motion, but the time interval between them is not knowable before hand, and it is indeterminate and variable.

My line of thinking was actually in place when I walked across the front lawn at the beginning of my walk. As I crossed the lawn heading toward the driveway, I noticed the sunlight on the grass and colored leaves, and I thought, maybe the Newtonian laws are precisely applicable to our size scale of things, but that far down in the small scale of things there is at work some major non-Newtonian process that accounts for this feeling of having a personally determinative role -- i.e., having free will. The insight into the electron-photon interaction arrived when I was about 10 yards south of where the Crescent Trail crosses Little Falls Parkway.

Thus my report to you on this matter.

later,

      b

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