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I thought the list might be interested in the
following:
I've begun (finally) the massive task of sorting, inventorying, inspecting, and repacking my father's reference library (which I am planning to donate to a university, although I haven't chosen one yet-- VCU has been hemming and hawing over one of my stipulations-- that the collection must remain intact for 50 years or be returned to my keeping; no mixing it all in with the rest of the library inventory-- which I insist on because I think there is information in the collection, itself. So, all options are open as far as I'm concerned, until I sign something). There are all sorts of gems in there; sometimes it's a book (there's a Japanese language version of one of Dad's books, and I actually can't tell which book it is! Anyone here read Japanese? It's got a 1971 publication date on it, so it is too early to be AS or FM). Sometimes, it's a discovery on my part of one of Dad's papers published in someone else's book. Other times, it's Dad's notations marking up a book-- which can be frankly hilarious on occasion-- especially if he was expressing honest irritation. But sometimes there are amazing moments; finding, in his notation and underlining, past moments where he was putting together some of the important pieces... One such book is titled "Philosophic Foundations of Quantum
Mechanics" by Hans Reichenbach. I wouldn't have thought this book would
be of interest to me, but it had all this underlining and scribbled notes in it,
so I started reading it. There are aspects in it that are right on target for
discussions on the list in the past couple months. For example, here are a few
excerpts (with Dad's underlining), starting on Page 1:
"The philosophical problems of quantum mechanics are centered around
two main issues. The first concerns the transition from causal laws to
probability laws; the second concerns the interpretation of unobserved
objects. We begin with the discussion of the first issue...
The question of replacing causal laws by statistical laws made it
appearance in the history of physics long before the times of the theory of
quanta. Since the time of Boltzmann's great discovery which revealed the
second principle of thermodynamics to be a statistical instead of a causal
law, the opinion has been repeated uttered that a similar fate may meet all
other physical laws. The idea of determinism, i.e., of strict causal laws
governing the elementary phenomena of nature, was recognized as an extrapolation
inferred from he causal regularities of the macrocosm. The validity of this
extrapolation was questioned as soon as it turned out that macrocosmic
regularity is equally compatible with irregularity in the microcosmic domain,
since the law of great numbers will transform the probability character of the
elementary phenomena into the practical certainty of statistical laws.
Observations in the macrocosmic domain will never furnish any evidence for
causality of atomic occurrences so long as only effects of great numbers of
atomic particles are considered. This was the result of unprejudiced
philosophical analysis of the physics of Boltzmann.
With this result a decision of the question was postponed until it was
possible to observe macrocosmic effects of individual atomic phenomena. Even
with the use of observations of this kind, however, the question is not easily
answered, but requires the development of a more profound logical analysis.
Whenever we speak of strictly causal laws we assume them to hold
between idealized physical states; and we know that the actual physical
states never correspond exactly to the conditions assumed for the laws. This
discrepancy has often been disregarded as irrelevant, as being due to the
imperfection of the experimenter and therefore negligible in a statement about
causality as a property of nature. With such an attitude, however, the way to
a solution of the problem of causality is barred. Statements about the
physical world have meaning only so far as they are connected with verifiable
results; and a statement about strict causality must be translatable into a
statements about observable relations if it is to have a utilizable meaning.
The statement that nature is governed by strict causal laws means
that we can predict the future with a determinate probability and that we can
push this probability as close to certainty as we want by using a
sufficiently elaborate analysis of the phenomena under consideration.
With this formulation the principle of causality is stripped of its
disguise as a principle a priori, in which it has been presented within many a
philosophical system. If causality is stated as a limit of probability
implications, it is clear that this principle can be maintained only in the
sense of an empirical hypothesis. There is, logically, no need for saying that
the probability of predictions can be can be made to approach certainty by the
introduction of more and more parameters. In this form the possibility of a
limit of predictability was recognized even before quantum mechanics led to the
assertion of such a limit."
I've never heard it said that some of the laws of physics are not causal in
nature but probablistic/statistical. This book was published in 1944! >From what
I've seen of the resistance to my father's work on relational causality and his
far less incendiary description of the scientific "laws" derived from Physics,
it seems like questioning the applicability of laws of physics to causality is
almost a lynching offense.
Judith
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