Abstract

APPARENTLY, however, in spite of the unqualified statement concerning prediction quoted above, Sir Arthur denies that we can predict the behaviour of electrons more certainly than that of horses, and the importance, to all but the physicist, of the “decline of determinism” therefore depends on the recognition of electrons as bodies co-equal with ordinary physical objects. To establish this he claims that since physical objects, as well as electrons and such particles, are all ‘inferences’, they differ only in degree and not in kind. We must not, however, be deceived by words. Objects which we see and handle may be, as he says, as inferential as an undiscovered planet inferred from irregularities in the motion of Uranus, but the inferences are of different kinds; otherwise, why, when a planet was seen in a different position from that inferred from the irregularities, was it without question preferred to the ‘undiscovered’ inferential planet ? There was not even an instinctive estimate of the ‘degree’ of validity to be attributed to the two ‘inferences’. Unless Sir Arthur assigns to “direct observation” a status essentially different from that of rational deduction, it is difficult to see how his position can be “in no sense an abdication of scientific method”. All this, however, does not affect determinism in relation to physical objects, arid it is to be hoped that Sir Arthur's plain statement will do much to remove the widespread delusion that modern physics has revealed a universe of unrestrained caprice.

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