Abstract
THE twenty-seventh Guthrie Lecture of the Physical Society was delivered on May 18 by Prof. E. T. Whittaker, who took as his subject “Chance, Freewill, and Necessity in the Scientific Conception of the Universe”. The lecture was devoted to a study of the association which has been held to exist between the philosophical theory of determinism on one hand, and the scientific view of the world on the other. When a coin is tossed, we say that whether it comes down heads or tails is a matter of 'chance'. This does not mean that there is any real indetermination in the occurrence ; but merely that we cannot make a confident prediction, because we do not know the precise velocities of translation and rotation which were communicated to the coin by the thumb of the operator, or the exact mass and figure of the coin, or the density and resistance of the air. If these, and the other relevant data which are unknown to us, are called the 'hidden parameters', then an imaginary person to whom the values of the hidden parameters were correctly known would be able, by aid of the laws of dynamics, to calculate mathematically all the circumstances of the flight and to determine whether the coin would fall heads or tails.
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Chance, Freewill and Necessity. Nature 151, 612–613 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/151612d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/151612d0