Dina Adel

While reading Steven Pinker's latest book, Rationality, I came across a problematic paragraph in chapter 3 which is supposed to be about probability and randomness. He begins by noting Einstein and his famous saying about God playing dice with the world, and he mentions the importance of not mistaking nonrandom pattern for nonrandom process. Then he gets to the paragraph below: All this raises the question of what kinds of physical mechanism can generate random events. Einstein notwithstanding, most physicists believe there is irreducible randomness in the subatomic realm of quantum mechanics, like the decay of an atomic nucleus or the emission of a photon when an electron jumps from one energy state to another. It’s possible for this quantum uncertainty to be amplified to scales that impinge on our lives. When I was a research assistant in an animal behavior lab, the refrigerator-sized minicomputers of the day were too slow to generate random-looking numbers in real time, and my supervisor had invented a gadget with a capsule filled with a radioactive isotope and a teensy-weensy Geiger counter that detected the intermittent particle spray and tripped a switch that fed the pigeon. Now, I can't get the idea of the last sentence altogether. what does an animal behavior lab have to do with Geiger counter and feeding pigeons, and with randomness to begin with!