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January 25 - February 1, 2023
In philosophical terms, he told him as he took his arm, this was the end of determinism. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised. According to the determinists, if one could reveal the laws that governed matter, one could reach back to the most archaic past and predict the most distant future. If everything that occurred was the direct consequence of a prior state, then merely by looking at the present and running the equations it would be possible to achieve a godlike knowledge of the
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Where before there had been a cause for every effect, now there was a spectrum of probabilities. In the deepest substrate of all things, physics had not found the solid, unassailable reality Schrödinger and Einstein had dreamt of, ruled over by a rational God pulling the threads of the world, but a domain of wonders and rarities, borne of the whims of a many-armed goddess toying with chance.
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That physics should cease to speak of an objective world was not only a change in its point of view—it was a betrayal of the very spirit of science. For Einstein, physics must speak of causes and effects, and not only of probabilities. He refused to believe that the facts of the world obeyed a logic so contrary to common sense.
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