Book Review: God Does Not Play Dice

Book Review: God Does Not Play Dice
-- David A. Shiang

I picked it up thinking that it is another Stephen Hawking or Carl Sagan kind of books. The author does talk about things like Counter-factual Definiteness, Superdeterminism etc., a lot. But, the similarity ends right there.

Author is an MIT graduate and works for UCB. Though this book is about Physics (and Mathematics) and the author tries to rip of several classical mathematical theories that have been taken for granted for hundreds of years, he is a fellow in English at UCB.

One line summary of the book would be "If one can't understand or explain a particular phenomenon, one shouldn't call that random. Period." Sounds fair enough. 

But, the author doesn't stop there. He extrapolates his above wisdom and takes its aid to criticize Uncertainity Principle, Feynmenn's Nobel prize winning  Sum over Histories idea etc., Once in a while he quotes a statement by Einstein (who, apparently didn't get completely convinced by his won theory of relativity, as he was not ready to accept that "God Does Play Dice, and hence there is randomness all over") and makes fun of Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan as they suggested that "our existence is not by design, but, due to a mere chance and evolution".

If he had limited himself to criticizing Nobel prize winning theories that explain super-complex cosmological phenomenon, people like me would have just turned pages and left intrigued. But, he gets to much more basic stuff and calls probability a farce, proposes a difference between 'probability' and 'frequency'. According to him, when a fair coin is tossed, there is no 50-50 chance of seeing a head. It would either be a head or tail. We just don't know. So, there is some design that we don't understand. So, we shouldn't call it random. What we call 'chance' is in fact 'frequency' of seeing heads, when the experiment (tossing the coin) is repeated for a long time. And, that frequency has nothing to do with the outcome of a single experiment. Sounds right, but, if one has the question, "Probability was never intended to answer the outcome of a single experiment with 100% certainty. So what's your point ?", he doesn't explain any further. He just takes the universal escape route, "there 'may' be an intelligent designer behind all these. We are incapable of understanding. So, let's not call it random".

As per this logic, everything is predetermined. We just don't know. And, he uses this theory as answer to the free will problem as well. He brings retrospective perspective into everything that he discusses, and claims that there indeed is no freewill.

At the end of it, I am not convinced about anything that he talks. But, lot of points to ponder and it makes a good philosophical discussion rather than a scientific breakthrough, contrary to his claims.