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Birkhäuser Boston eBooks

Dice Games and Conspiracies

David Wick

Published Jan 1, 1995• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Ever since Newton, two forms of influence or causation have vied for supremacy in physicist’s theories. Descartes and his followers thought local or contiguous action — material particles colliding and rebounding, for example — the essence of mechanical explanation; Newton evoked their wrath by advancing a form of action at a distance. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Maxwell and Einstein restored the local picture in their continuum theories of electromagnetism and gravity, and the cycle seemed to have come to an end — until Bell proved his theorem in 1964. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

DOI
10.1007/978-1-4612-5361-7_12

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Ever since Newton, two forms of influence or causation have vied for supremacy in physicist’s theories. Descartes and his followers thought local or contiguous action — material particles colliding and rebounding, for example — the essence of mechanical explanation; Newton evoked their wrath by advancing a form of action at a distance. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Maxwell and Einstein restored the local picture in their continuum theories of electromagnetism and gravity, and the cycle seemed to have come to an end — until Bell proved his theorem in 1964. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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The new physics just described was still based largely on Newtonian ideas. Indeed, in its theoretical aspects, it might not unfairly be described as a final attempt to explain the world in materialistic terms—as particles being pushed and pulled about in space and time. Nevertheless, the new physics had found it necessary to abolish most of the forces of pushing and pulling, replacing the gradual changes of motion of the particles under these forces by sudden and unpredictable jumps. These appeared to involve violations of the law of causality, both in the disintegration of radioactive atoms and also in the internal changes of ordinary atoms. We seemed to see Fate defying this law as she picked out certain atoms for disintegration or collapse and, by her apparently capricious acts, sent the universe along one path or another according to her whim. On such lines the new physics had explained many phenomena which had hitherto seemed inexplicable, but it had by no means met with complete success. For instance, while it gave a perfect interpretation of the simplest spectrum of all, namely that of the hydrogen atom, it failed with more complex spectra. This was not necessarily a fatal objection; a few emendations and possibly a few new ad hoc assumptions might have effected a complete reconciliation, although this seems improbable.
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Primitive man must have found nature singularly puzzling and intricate. The simplest phenomena could be trusted to recur indefinitely; an unsupported body invariably fell, a stone thrown into water sank, while a piece of wood floated. Yet other more complicated phenomena shewed no such uniformity—the lightning struck one tree in the grove while its neighbour of similar growth and equal size escaped unharmed; one month the new moon brought fair weather, the next month foul. Confronted with a natural world which was to all appearances as capricious as himself, man's first impulse was to create Nature in his own image; he attributed the seemingly erratic and unordered course of the universe to the whims and passions of gods, or of benevolent or malevolent lesser spirits. Only after much study did the great principle of causation emerge. In time it was found to dominate the whole of inanimate nature: a cause which could be completely isolated in its action was found invariably to produce the same effect. What happened at any instant did not depend on the volitions of extraneous beings, but followed inevitably by inexorable laws from the state of things at the preceding instant. And this state of things had in turn been inevitably determined by an earlier state, and so on indefinitely, so that the whole course of events had been unalterably determined by the state in which the world found itself at the first instant of its history; once this had been fixed, nature could move only along one road to a predestined end.