May 03, 2019 Friday
Bedtime Story
Nature is both Stochastic and Causal
Some (not all) of the greatest minds that
have existed in human history such as Aristotle, Epicurus, Leucippus,
Democritus, Ludwig Boltzmann, Jacques Monod (who is the author of the award winning
book “Chance and Necessity: Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology”
(1970)), Russian chemist Ilya Prigogine (author of the 1996 book “The End of
Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature”) have understood and
reconciled with the inherent indeterminism of the nature of the universe that
we happen to live in.
This is one of my favorite quotes of Ilya
Prigogine, “The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes
to believe in determinism.”
(I think it is intentionally based on the
famous quotation of Steven Weinberg: the more the universe seems
comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
That is my assumption and I may be wrong
though.)
It is not that the men who accept the
chancy nature of the universe, or the indeterminists as they are called, deny
the existence of causes.
Just as indeterminism is the fundamentalism
truth about the nature so is the principle of causality and they both exist in
complete harmony without any contradiction.
In physics causality is one of the most
fundamental and essential notions on which the entire subject is based upon.
In one of the unpublished manuscript of the
1910 lecture by Einstein titled “On Boltzmann’s Principle and some immediate
consequences thereof’ there is this statement somewhere where he states, “All
natural science is based upon the hypothesis of the complete causal connection
of all events.”
Now let us see how causality and
indeterminism coexist in complete harmony with some examples.
For instance it is well established that
smoking and chewing tobacco are strongly causative to lung and oral cancers.
Similarly it is well proven that driving
under the influence of alcohol definitely leads to greater incidence of road
traffic accidents.
On the other hand saving money and
investing a portion of it in the market shares and government-issued bonds is an
act of prudent financing and is likely to give greater dividends than keeping
the same amount of currency in a savings account.
And yet in each instance it is not
necessary that each act such as smoking or chewing tobacco, consuming alcohol
and investing wisely will necessary lead to outcomes that are professed by the
expert authorities in the respective fields.
Hence the determinists while accepting that
everything has cause content that such causes do not constrain the outcome of
future to a single course.
Thus the statement “that everything has a
cause” while accepted by the indeterminists still is not a statement for
determinism.
We can put forth this argument in a form of
simple logic statements that will add to its clarity.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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