Expert: Daniel Mazur - 8/5/2009

Question
Hi Dan,

I wanted to discuss a very interesting thing with you. You may not have an exact explanation for it....but just wanted to know your views....

There's something called "NADI ASTROLOGY" here in india.
It's basically an old text written down on leaves.

This text tells you your past and future to utmost accuracy.
These leaves are now spread throughout the country, but it contains the entire life of every human who is living , lived or will live on the planet.
They take a "thumbprint" of yours and locate leaves that are close mathces to your thumbprint.
When they find the right one, they tell you all about your past life so far....including details like your name and full names and professions etc. of any of your family member you like.

They then tell you your future and it really turns out to be true.
You could search about it online or read accounts of many people who have gone through it.
There's something very similar to it called the "BRIGHU SANHITA"
which is also a text written down on leaves and contains life accounts of all humans.

Please don't think that all of it might be crap, because it isn't.
Why I say that is because they give you such details about your
life, about which hardly anyone apart from you or your near ones know.

They say, quantum mechanics tells us that we can't even find out our present accurately, leave alone the future.
And no matter how strange the theory is (though it just seems to be strange in the beginning), the thing going in for QM is that it works.

But at the same time, how is it possible that sages, thousands of years back wrote down stuff about all humans???
And just like QM, the thing going for it is
that "it works too!!"

I'm not trying to say  that QM is all false, but can't it be possible that it's just a special case of a more general thing, and that nature is not undeterministic afterall???
Or not even a special case, can't it be that we just don't have a way, direct or indirect, to figure out what actually happens in there with electrons and photons...??

And yes, it's not that I find QM "peculiar" or bizzare, infact it sounded amazing to me in the beginning and now i'm pretty much used to thinking in that new way....so no problem there...
but at the same time, wea lso have something called nadi astrology, that works too....so that makes me think, that perhaps there might be some internal mechanism in electrons and photons becuase of which they behave the way they do....perhaps it could be that presently we just don't have any idea how to figure it out or go about it, expeimentally or theoretically....
but how can the scientific community be so "sure" of it?/??
Yeah ofcourse it all works but so do the things about which i told you......

would be great to have your views on it....

cheers...
shikhin


Answer
Hi Shikhin,
I didn't know about his Nadi Astrology at all before you mentioned it. I will tell you my opinion, even though it is unclear, if you wanted my views of the astrology, of QM or both. So, astrology first.

There are several kinds of astrology in the world that claim to be accurate. The Chinese/Korean five-element astrology also claims that, a branch of numerology that my aunt does (no, not for living :-)) claims as good a success rate as palm reading.... Over 80%. The fact is that we are far from scientific understanding all nature. There is certainly a gap in our knowledge and this is the traditional domain of "beliefs". Even though the relation between fingerprints (or palms or date of birth...) and fate may be non-trivial, it cannot be considered a scientific fact. One problem being that no two people have been born yet that would be known to have identical fingerprints, so one cannot take a statistically significant group of people and say "look, all these guys have the same fingerprint and look, they all have the same challenges in life, tend to make the same decision,.... they have/had the same fate".

Another problem is that as soon as the prediction is made and the subject KNOWS about it, they change the basic assumptions of their life. In a way, it would also have to be encoded in the fingerprint that you, at a certain age, had a prediction made that you believed and thus altered your life either into coherence or into interference with that same prediction. Along the same line, even the most rational people often seek guidance in astrology, but it is usually not to passively await what's coming, but to actively seek to fulfill or avoid the prediction, if it is good or bad, respectively.

Astrology - any sort - depends on people, who do it and who believe it. Both these kinds have vested interest in others believing as well and that is the main reason for me to approach it cautiously and doubtfully. Simply put, I don't trust people with vested interest. It may work, but my knowledge is telling me that it is a matter of belief and not of rational reasoning. And as there is, scientifically, only one truth and the rest is rubbish, any particular astrology has a much better chance to be scientifically rubbish than being the one truth :-). The same can be said about physics theories, of course, they all can be possibly correct until experiments establish which one is...

In QM you already know that a quantum system changes by the mere fact of being observed. Future of a single particle is virtually unpredictable to us, as soon as it comes to interaction with something (other particle, potential barrier...) else. However, future of a quadrillion particles bound together is already very much predictable to us thanks to the way quantum world laws transition to the classical laws, when numbers of particles are great. But then it is no longer quantum mechanics... In the other direction, you are quite correct in saying that there may be another, deeper underlying principle to quantum mechanics that would give us more insight. You are not the only one speculating about that and I think that a significant part of the scientific community doubts that QM is the terminal stop on our way to understand the world of elementary particles. But you said it yourself: All experiments so far are IN AGREEMENT with the quantum postulates. This is the very reason, why we are "so sure" about it. It is not the certainty of knowing the "final truth" - it is the certainty of knowing a "good enough truth to be getting along with". And that's what there's to it.

So, you asked for a view and here it is. Take care!
Daniel