Not everybody likes parties though and the possibility I entertained earlier, of a party at the edge of the universe ever coming off, was almost quashed between the 17th and late nineteenth century.
The culprits of course were scientists (rather than magicians, who are known to love a party anywhere) and the reason for their efforts in this direction lies, not in any killjoy trait in the scientific character (though this has been an oft aired accusation in the past) but in the fact that scientists, like the rest of humanity, like to face their universe with a certain degree of certainty.
And certainty is just what the Newtonian model of a mechanical, totally deterministic universe offered. Based on the original observations of the motion of a pendulum bob made in 1583 by the Italian astronomer, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, an English mathematician and natural philosopher was able to formulate the laws governing the fundamental behaviour of bodies in motion.
The principles of The Motion of Bodies was published in 1687 in Newton’s work Principia (Lat. Principles) and came to be known as Newtonian mechanics. When scientists saw that Newton’s laws of mechanics could be applied to just about any moving object in the universe and give a very good approximation of the result, they saw no reason why this could not be so in any direction in time and space.
Thus, after studying the behaviour of any physical object during an instant in time, scientists became confident that not only could they then ‘magically’ predict what was going to happen at any other given instant in the future by extrapolating its behaviour, but they could also tell exactly what had happened in the past. What’s more, unlike any other form of magic, they could do so with -what they then believed was- a terrific degree of precision.
The philosophical basis of this rigourously deterministic model of the universe had been laid more than forty years earlier by the fundamental division between ‘I’, the observer, and the observed world outside, introduced by the French philosopher and mathematician Réne Descartes in 1644.
Descartes believed in the existence of an independent, absolute world that had nothing to do with the senses. To hark back to my earlier example then, the description of a party, any party, given by a person became the definitive description of that party. The rationale was that since the party had an independent existence, totally removed from the observer; then the description the observer gave would be identical in every way to the description given by any other observer, including the host.
Now, those of us who have tried to gatecrash a party and have been found out, know this is not true. At the time however it did seem true to many and another French mathematician, Pierre Simon Laplace, gave what is perhaps the clearest expression of the world that was emerging.“An intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature,” he said, “and the position of all things of which the world consists -supposing the said intellect were vast enough to subject these data to analysis- would embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the slightest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for it and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.” Setting a trend that’s remained to this day then, scientists proceeded to take over the jobs of court astrologers and fortune tellers and relegated both the former and the latter into the dustbin of history.The universe, they argued, is totally deterministic.
Free will is illusory, God (if he exists) is reduced to turning the pages to a play that’s already been written and man, far from being the centre of things, is consigned to mouthing the empty lines of character actors.
The attraction of such a soulless universe, devoid of the life, vitality and dynamism of the magical model, was that within its framework predictions could be made that were accurate. If not quite as accurate as those envisaged by Laplace at least accurate to within a very tolerable standard.Not surprisingly magicians fell out of favour. Their definition of a vague, uncertain world which required their constant mediation to keep things in line, was suddenly out of fashion.
If the fact that man had very suddenly been marginalised and the validity of free will disputed, left a sour taste in the mouth, it was made a little more palatable by the promise that very soon every mystery of Nature that had remained hidden would now become known. The very concept of the existence of a soul was now at best trivialised and at worst doubted. After all the soul could neither be directly observed nor its actions exactly predicted and to many scientists, the claim that there did exist one, smacked of ignorance and superstition. It was seen as the direct result of man’s inability to explain the reasons behind his own actions. The soul was then discarded, but given enough hard data and information everything else would be made to fit into this grandiose clockwork of the universe; including, some scientists claimed, those quirky behavioural traits that were used as the basis for the existence of a soul.
Given enough information, they argued, the behaviour and thoughts of every individual, from the buying of this book to attending a party in a distant part of the universe, could be accurately predicted. In a mechanistic universe it is possible to create the ultimate police state where the actions of every individual could be mapped out and analysed even before that individual undertook those actions. In other words not only would they (whoever ‘they’ would have turned out to be) know what you would do next, they would also know why. This is possible because in the eyes of the proponents of the mechanistic universe we are all reduced to the status of machines, albeit complicated ones, and our behaviour is equally determinable. In a short space of time, the proponents of hard science continued, not only would there be no place for anything in the least magical, in this universe, but the nature of science would also drastically change as everything that could possibly happen would be predicted and everything that could possibly exist would then be known. All man had to do was develop powerful enough and large enough, information processing capabilities. These capabilities, presumably, would copy the ideal model of the universe and take the form of more and more complex machines.
Thus, in the span of a relatively short time science managed to become not only the first profession to successfully do away with magic, but also the very first one to wish to try to do away with its own job!
Fortunately for all concerned things did not exactly work out that way. The universe may appear to run like a clockwork, but no amount of information collecting is capable of determining what will happen next. And as quantum mechanics came to show, in the early 1920s, the very act of collecting information changes the state of being of the object being observed thus adding to its indeterminacy.
Electrons for example, revolving around atomic nuclei are hazy clouds of probability and you can either know their velocity or know their momentum but never both accurately enough to allow you to predict a distinct instant in space and time when an electron will manifest out of the electronic cloud of its indeterminacy and appear as a distinct, concrete, entity.
Even the component parts of the atomic nucleus itself, the protons and the neutrons, are now perceived as constantly vibrating, empty space bounded by their form.
Science’s brief flirtation with a totally predictable universe, and its accompanying put-down, was not without benefits however. The best thing to come out of that era are a couple of very useful theories formulated by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his American counterpart John Bell, which tellingly show why the universe can never be truly deterministic even if at times it appears to behave that way, and which we will look at later.
It wasn’t long after the introduction of quantum mechanics which successfully explained the behaviour of the universe at a microscopic level, that the clockwork universe was perceived for what it was, a useful approximation, but no more.
Magic was suddenly back in vogue and those who cared to could, once more, entertain the notion of a party at the edge of the universe, without having to worry that their every decision and thought would be predicted in advance by an alien operating a super-powerful computer.
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