What Does Determinism Have In Common With Gods, The Flying Spaghetti Monster And Pink, Invisible Unicorns?

A common misconception by many lay-determinists (non-physicists) is that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle describes a technical problem of our measurements rather than a principle of the universe. However, Stephen Hawking predicted the radiation named after him as stemming from virtual particle/antiparticle pairs being generated by quantum vacuum fluctuations right at the event horizon of black holes. A similar effect was claimed to have been observed in the lab. Just this week, another effect having to do with quantum fluctuations in a vacuum generating particle/antiparticle pairs has been observed. Forty years ago it was predicted that these same fluctuations which are thought to give rise to Hawking Radiation should become ‘real’, i.e., visible photons when they hit a mirror which moves at a significant fraction of the speed of light. It is this generation of photons which was directly observed and reported in the paper cited above.