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