"It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset"
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Determinism used to be the swaggering promise of physics: give me the initial conditions, and I will give you the future. Eddington snaps that promise in half with a single move - not by pointing to human ignorance or sloppy measurement, but by arguing that modern physics refuses the premise at the starting line. If probabilities are baked in "from the outset", then the universe isn’t a clockwork you fail to read correctly; it’s a system whose most honest language is statistical.
The intent is partly corrective and partly philosophical. Eddington, a major public interpreter of Einstein and an early popularizer of the new quantum outlook, is warning readers not to smuggle Victorian certainty into 20th-century science. The verb "trap" matters: it frames determinism as an attempted interrogation technique, the old worldview trying to bully nature into confessing a single inevitable outcome. Modern physics, in his telling, won’t confess because it has nothing like that to confess.
The subtext is a rebuke to metaphysical overreach disguised as scientific confidence. He’s not celebrating fuzziness; he’s insisting on intellectual honesty about what the theories actually deliver. In the interwar years, as quantum mechanics unsettled classical intuitions and public debates about free will flared, Eddington positions probability not as a temporary patch but as a feature of the regime. The line works because it flips uncertainty from a personal failure into a structural fact: the limit isn’t the physicist’s competence, it’s the cosmos’s grammar.
The intent is partly corrective and partly philosophical. Eddington, a major public interpreter of Einstein and an early popularizer of the new quantum outlook, is warning readers not to smuggle Victorian certainty into 20th-century science. The verb "trap" matters: it frames determinism as an attempted interrogation technique, the old worldview trying to bully nature into confessing a single inevitable outcome. Modern physics, in his telling, won’t confess because it has nothing like that to confess.
The subtext is a rebuke to metaphysical overreach disguised as scientific confidence. He’s not celebrating fuzziness; he’s insisting on intellectual honesty about what the theories actually deliver. In the interwar years, as quantum mechanics unsettled classical intuitions and public debates about free will flared, Eddington positions probability not as a temporary patch but as a feature of the regime. The line works because it flips uncertainty from a personal failure into a structural fact: the limit isn’t the physicist’s competence, it’s the cosmos’s grammar.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
|---|---|
| Source | Arthur Eddington , quoted on Wikiquote: "It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism, because it deals with probabilities from the outset." |
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