- #1
msumm21
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- TL;DR Summary
- Questioning a remark by Anton Zeilinger that free will is required by science
Lord Jestocost said:To abandon freedom means to abandon science. In his book “Dance of the photons”, Anton Zeilinger remarks the following:
“The second important property of the world that we always implicitly assume is the freedom of the individual experimentalist. This is the assumption of free will. It is a free decision what measurement one wants to perform. In the experiment on the entangled pair of photons, Alice and Bob are free to choose the position of the switch that determines which measurement is performed on their respective particles. It was a basic assumption in our discussion that that choice is not determined from the outside. This fundamental assumption is essential to doing science. If this were not true, then, I suggest, it would make no sense at all to ask nature questions in an experiment, since then nature could determine what our questions are, and that could guide our questions such that we arrive at a false picture of nature.”
I'm not following the above quote about free will "This fundamental assumption is essential to doing science"
If I perform experiments and find that conditions X are followed by conditions Y and Y=F(X) (or the probabilistic analog for QM), haven't I done science, independent of how much my free will impacted X?