Westciv

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Determinism

Here is the speech of the Elder in GB Shaw'Too True to be Good" on the seismic shock felt in the twenties thirties by the discovery that Newton's laws didn't work in the realm of microphysics.
"yes sir: the universe of Isaac newton , which has been an imprgnable citadel of modern civilization for three hundred years,has crumbled like the walls of Jericho before teh criticism of Einstein. Newton's universe was the stonghold of rational determinism:the stars in their orbits obeyed immutably fixed laws:and when we turned from surveying their vastness to study the infinite littleness of the atoms,there too we found electrons in their orbits obeying the same universal laws.Every moment of time dictated and determined the following moment,and it was dictated and determined by the moment that came before it. Evrything was calculable: everything happened because it must: the commandmenst were erased from the tables of the law;and in their place came teh cosmic algebra: the equations of mathematicians. here wa my faith: here I found my dogma of infallibility: I who scorned alike the Catholic wit his dogma of free will,and the Protestant with his pretence of private judgment. And now -now-. The orbit of the elctron obeys no law:it chooses one path and rejects another:what is left of it:...all is caprice...p.84

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