The mysterious universe / by Sir James Jeans.

  • James Hopwood Jeans
Date:
1930
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The mysterious universe / by Sir James Jeans. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    46/180 page 28
    of any type whatever, pervades the whole universe destroys the case for absolutely strict causation, this latter being the characteristic of perfectly-fitting machinery. These and other considerations to which we shall return below (p. 123) have led many physicists to suppose that there is no determinism in events in which atoms and electrons are involved singly, and that the apparent determinism in large scale events is only of a statistical nature. When we are dealing with atoms and electrons in crowds, the mathema¬ tical law of averages imposes the determinism which physical laws have failed to provide. We can illustrate the concept by an analogous situation in the large-scale world. If we spin a half¬ penny, nothing within our knowledge may be able to decide whether it will come down heads or tails, yet if we throw up a million tons of half-pence, we know there will be 500,000 tons of heads and 500,000 tons of tails. The experiment may be repeated indefinitely, and will always give the same result. We may be tempted to instance it as evidence of the uniformity of nature, and to infer the action of an underlying law of causation: in actual fact it is an instance only of the operation of the purely mathematical laws of chance. Yet the number of half-pence in a million tons is nothing in comparison with the number of atoms in even the smallest piece of matter with which the earlier physicists could experiment. It is easy to see how the illusion of determinacy—if it is an illusion— crept into science.
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