God tweets about playing dice

There's a book coming out in November, The Last Testament: A Memoir by God. "God" tweets at TheTweetOfGod, and "He" just twote:

Do you ever lose when you play cards?" Remember Einstein! I play not cards, but dice. And I never lose. The dice are loaded. And so am I.

There you have it, folks. The title of this blog is correct.

Einstein plays dice

Not only does God throw dice, but Einstein does too, or at least a stencil of him on a wall in the Upper Haight in San Francisco does. This post suggests that it may have been by the graffiti artist Banksy. It's been painted over.

More pictures here and here.

It's been painted over, apparently. That's probably for the best, because that means I won't try to find it when I move to the Bay Area.

(Oh, yeah, I'm moving! I got a job at Berkeley.)

A nonreligious statement

Through my logs, I came across a forum where people have pointed to a post on this blog.

They then veer off into saying things about religion. I suspect this may be due to the title of this blog.

I just want to state that "God Plays Dice" has nothing to do with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic-etc. deity. It is a reference to the following quote of Einstein, in a letter to Max Born:

Quantum mechanics is very impressive. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secrets of the Old One. I am at any rate convince that He does not play dice."

(I'm copying this out of Gino Segre's Faust in Copenhagen; it's originally from Einstein's letter to Born, December 4, 1926, which is reprinted in The Born-Einstein Letters.) The "Old One" to whom Einstein is referring here was, as far as we know, not what is usually meant by "God"; I suspect that this is why the translator (Irene Born) chose this translation, although I don't know what Einstein said in the original German. To be totally honest, I don't know if the original was even in German.

The purpose of the title is that I feel that probability is an important tool for understanding the world, which Einstein may have been a bit skeptical about, at least in the case of quantum mechanics. And there's something of a tradition in the titling of math blogs of taking sayings of well-known mathematicians and "replying" to them. (By "tradition" I mean The Unapologetic Mathematician also does it, in response to Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology.)

Also, for some reason I had thought it was Bohr, not Born, that he wrote this to. I suspect this is because I've heard more things about Bohr than Born, and they sound similar.

I suspect the people at the forum in question won't read this, though. But making this post makes me feel like I've replied to them.

edited, 5:56 pm: I was wondering if there were any blogs whose titles riff on the quote that "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems" (usually attributed to Erdos, but supposedly actually due to Renyi). I found Tales from an English Coffee Drinker. The quote from Goethe, "Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different", also would be good as a source for a blog title.