John Kineman wrote:This was VERY dissatisfying to the physicists who were forced to accept it after Einstein, and particularly dissatisfying to Einstein who spent the remainder of his life trying to disprove it (the famous "God doesn't play dice" quote).Hi John, I just wanted to interject a brief comment here. This level of dis- satisfaction on the part of ~European~ physicists seems not to have been shared by ~American~ physicists, i.e. there seems to have been a cul- tural subtext to this question that affected the reactions of the physicists. European physicists, in general, had minds well-stocked with philosophical ideas dating back, in a relatively unbroken line, to the ancient Greeks. In contrast, American physicists had much less training, or interest, in philosophy -- they thought of themselves as pragmatists. The result was that Americans accepted quantum theory without so much as skipping a beat, and they frankly couldn't understand why the Europeans were so bugged about it. Or, at any rate, this is the argument advanced by Nancy Cartwright in a chapter she wrote for a book called The Probabilistic Revolution. Cartwright, as I understand her, favors the American point of view. Even though I think my tendencies lie more with the Europeans, I think her exposition of the differences between the two points of view is very good. Best regards, Mike McIntyre