“It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.”

New Pathways in Science (1935) Ch. V Indeterminacy and Quantum Theory, p. 105

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabi…" by Arthur Stanley Eddington?
Arthur Stanley Eddington photo
Arthur Stanley Eddington 105
British astrophysicist 1882–1944

Related quotes

Isaac Asimov photo

“In stochastic processes the future is not uniquely determined, but we have at least probability relations enabling us to make predictions.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter XV, Markov Chains, p. 420.

“It is dangerous to attach probability zero to anything other than a logical impossibility.”

Dennis Lindley (1923–2013) British statistician

5. The Rules of Probability. p. 64.
Understanding Uncertainty (2006)

“Had there been a computer in 1872… it would probably have predicted that there would be so many horse-drawn vehicles that it would be impossible to clear up all the manure.”

Karl William Kapp (1910–1976) American economist

Quote about the computerized estimates of the end of the world. Cited in: Ian Murray (1972) " Workers told of peril of technology http://www.kwilliam-kapp.de/pdf/Kapp%20in%20NYT%2072.pdf". In: The Times, April 16, 1972

Robert B. Laughlin photo

“I slowly became disillusioned with the reductionist ideal of physics, for it was completely clear that the outcome of these experiments was almost always impossible to predict from first principles, yet was right and meaningful and certainly regulated by the same microscopic laws that work in atoms.”

Robert B. Laughlin (1950) American physicist

On his education at MIT.
Nobel Prize autobiography (1998)
Context: I learned about X-ray diffraction, neutron scattering, raman scattering, infrared absorption spectroscopy, heat capacity, transport, time-dependent transport, magnetic resonance, electron diffraction, electron energy loss spectroscopy — all the experimental techniques that constitute the eyes and ears of modern solid state physics. As this occurred I slowly became disillusioned with the reductionist ideal of physics, for it was completely clear that the outcome of these experiments was almost always impossible to predict from first principles, yet was right and meaningful and certainly regulated by the same microscopic laws that work in atoms. Only many years later did I finally understand that this truth, which seems so natural to solid state physicists because they confront experiments so frequently, is actually quite alien to other branches of physics and is vigorously repudiated by many scientists on the grounds that things not amenable to reductionist thinking are not physics.

Edward Teller photo
Neil Strauss photo
Jacques Ellul photo
Christopher Hitchens photo

Related topics