The Laws Of Ordinary Science Are Illusory

Now let us take the second question relating to the laws. Since the time of Galileo and Newton, scientists have believed that the world is a big machine governed purely by mechanical laws. By the end of the Twentieth Century even the human brain came to be regarded as an intricate machine, governed by the purely mechanical laws of cause and effect. The concept of the free will of man was destroyed, and religion and morality ceased to have any meaning for science.

But the emergence of the electron on the stage of science brought about a complete revolution. The myth of the mechanistic structure of the universe was exploded. The electrons, which were recognized as the ultimate units of the physical world, were found not to be governed by mechanical laws. They seemed to be completely free in their behavior. The law of causation which is a presupposition of science was found to have no meaning for them. 1 If there was any law at all which governed their behavior, it was the Law of Indeterminacy, as Professor Heisenberg called it. The apparent determinism in events and the uniformity of nature were illusions, created by the functioning of electrons in crowds.

James Jeans explains this by means of the following illustration: "If we spin a half-penny, nothing within our knowledge will be able to decide whether it will come down heads or tails, yet if we throw up a million tons of halfpence, we know there will be 500,000 tons of heads and 500,000 tons of tails. The experiment may be repeated time after time 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."

There is no determinism in events in which electrons are involved singly, but when a huge crowd of them is involved, as in the smallest piece of matter with which the earlier physicists could experiment, the illusion of determinacy creeps in. But this apparent determinism in large-scale events is of a statistical nature. Dirac describes it as follows: "When an observation is made on any atomic system … in a given state the result will not in general be determinate, i.e., if the experiment is repeated several times under identical conditions several different results may be obtained. If the experiment is repeated a large number of times, it will be found that each particular result will be obtained a definite fraction of the total number of times, so that one can say there is a definite probability of its being obtained any time the experiment is performed. This probability the theory enables one to calculate." The laws of the physical sciences are, thus, not fully determinate or necessary. They are only laws of probability based on the mathematical law of averages.