Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle By Albert Einstein

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With regard to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Albert Einstein famously said, on several occasions, that, “God does not play dice with the universe.”1 Like many great rational thinkers––and perhaps the human mind more generally––Einstein was remiss to believe that, at a fundamental level, nature could be as random as the throw of a die. Unfortunately for Einstein, much of quantum mechanics posits the inherent randomness of nature’s most basic elements. However, Einstein and the devout can take some solace in prime numbers about which the famous number theorist Carl Pomerance once remarked, “God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers.” Prime numbers have been of interest to mathematicians for centuries, and we owe much of our existing knowledge on the subject to thinkers who lived well before the Common Era––such as Euclid who demonstrated that there are infinitely many prime numbers around 300 BCE. Yet, for as long as primes have been an element of the mathematician’s lexicon, many questions about prime numbers remain unreso...

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