determinism versus indeterminism

[josef rosenkranz]

I don't have the skill to deny anything about quantum mechanics and I didn't deny either the existence of the Casimir effect.
However as counterintuitive as a problem might be ,even in such a domain demanding high knowledge of physics,I don't believe that the essence of it is unaccessable to common wisdom.
Therefore I asked an din't get a clear answer if the Casimir effect means the creation of an event out of nothing previous ,which was my understanding of your statement of "pure random",or it is the causal effect of some previous event.

I'm not sure if this has been explained before, but...

There are particle-antiparticle pairs popping into and out of existence all around us (this is otherwise known as the 'quantum foam'). The Casimir effect is the force felt between two metal plates: they are so close together that fewer pairs can pop into existence between them than outside them. This means that more pairs are colliding with the plates on the outside than the inside, thus pushing the plates further together by a fraction.

Basically, the Casimir effect is where spontaneously generating particles push two metal plates closer together. Wiki has a good picture:

NB: 'vacuum fluctuations' simply means the fluctuations in a vacuum due to the spontaneously generating particles.

So yes, the Casimir effect is evidence of 'creation ex nihilo'

The item of this thread is determinism vs. indeterminism ,(which in my view bears consequences related to aheism,even if some members of this forum disagree),so from this point of view I said that it would be interesting to learn from your knowledge about the Casimir effect.

Indeterminism is a simple consequence of the quantum mechanical nature of the universe: not only is it impossible to know the exact position and momentum of a particle, but it doesn't have an exact position and momentum until you try to measure it (measuring its position lets you know where it is with more accuracy, but lowers the accuracy with which you know its momentum. Mathematically, ΔxΔp ≥ ħ/2).

You put it as if indeterminism is a consequence of a physical law.
I consider that more correctly is to say that the uncertainity principle is an expression of indeterminism, and even only a partial one.
In fact the difference between the Newtonian possibility of knowing the exact position of an object, knowing it's momentum and speed and the quantum mechanical possibility regarding a subatomical particle is only a statistical one.
That means that the position of the particle is not totally random but
predictable within some limits as expressed in the mathematical relation.
In other words the uncertainity principle is an expression of a dual form a physical laws including determinism as well as indeterminism.
Now,taking into consideration that the whole matter of the universe is made of atoms one can conclude that this duality of indeterminism and determinism is in fact a general law of matter.
If we leave the subatomic world and look around at our close experiences in classical physics or in other areas of human activity, governed by statistical laws, the same duality is most evident.
Each statistic law has at it's core a predictable relation ,conventionally limited, and beyond those limits the statistic becomes more and more random.

About the Casimir effect as a creation "ex nihilo" I still have my reserves because it is not only "counterintuitive" as Purple Rabbit put it in such a fine English expression but it is straight "antiintuitive" ,which may be the same but a little bit stronger as I see in your "ex nihilo creation".
I would not dare to contradict scientist who affirm the ex nihilo effect would we have more large knowledge about the antimatter,which we don't.
Physics is now blundering about the dark matter and I have not heard about any physicist of a high stature as Hawking,Penrose or others to have found the basic laws which govern antimatter.
So I would be more carefully by saying that the Casimir effect is "apparently " ex nihilo at the level of our knowledge about antimatter but that do not exclude the possibility to find in the future a still undisclosed causal phenomenon to it.
As an anecdote ,we know from history that the kings of the German dynasty of the Hohenzollern ,who ruled for a long time in Europe had this slogan written on their royal emblem "Nihil sine Deo" .
Putting together "Creation ex nihilo" with "Nihil sine Deo" we get
"Creation=Deo" q.e.d.