Haw Does God Play Dice.pdfVIP

Does God Play Dice? This lecture is about whether we can predict the future, or whether it is arbitrary and random. In ancient times, the world must have seemed pretty arbitrary. Disasters such as floods or diseases must have seemed to happen without warning, or apparent reason. Primitive people attributed such natural phenomena, to a pantheon of gods and goddesses, who behaved in a capricious and whimsical way. There was no way to predict what they would do, and the only hope was to win favour by gifts or actions. Many people still partially subscribe to this belief, and try to make a pact with fortune. They offer to do certain things, if only they can get an Agrade for a course, or pass their driving test. Gradually however, people must have noticed certain regularities in the behaviour of nature. These regularities were most obvious, in the motion of the heavenly bodies across the sky. So astronomy was the first science to be developed. It was put on a firm mathematical basis by Newton, more than 300 years ago, and we still use his theory of gravity to predict the motion of almost all celestial bodies. Following the example of astronomy, it was found that other natural phenomena also obeyed definite scientific laws. This led to the idea of scientific determinism, which seems first to have been publicly expressed by the French scientist, Laplace. I thought I would like to quote you Laplaces actual words, so I asked a friend to track them down. They are in French of course, not that I expect that would be any problem with this audience. But the trouble is, Laplace was rather like Prewst, in that he wrote sentences of inordinate length and complexity. So I have decided to para-phrase the quotation. In effect what he said was, that if at one time, we knew the positions and speeds of all the particles in the universe, then we could calculate their behaviour at any other time, in the past or future. There is a probably apocryphal story, that when Laplace was asked by N