Affiliation:
1. Department of Physics, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701
Abstract
Although physical laws or theories are often invoked in debates over “causality” and “determinism,” our best current understanding of physics assigns only a limited (though still very broad) validity to these concepts. It may be, thus, helpful (particularly when having to deal with the challenges posed by quantum mechanics) to think of them as prejudices, extrapolated from our experience with a limited (essentially classical) set of phenomena and/or theoretical models. This paper discusses how, over time, different physical theories have either reinforced or challenged these prejudices, focusing specifically on conservative “Laplacian” mechanics, dissipative mechanics (thermal physics), and quantum mechanics.
Publisher
American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT)
Subject
General Physics and Astronomy
Reference47 articles.
1. “Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,” (“Fortunate, who was able to know the causes of things”), Virgil, Georgica (II, v. 490), has been taken to refer to Lucretius' work “De Rerum Natura” (“On the nature of things”).
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