Читать книгу The Evolution of Everything: How Small Changes Transform Our World - Matt Ridley, Matt Ridley - Страница 11

The physicists, who had set the pace in tearing down skyhooks, continued to surprise the world. It fell to Pierre-Simon Laplace (using Emilie du Châtelet’s improvements to cumbersome Newtonian geometry) to take Newtonism to its logical conclusion. Laplace argued that the present state of the universe was ‘the effect of its past and the cause of its future’. If an intellect were powerful enough to calculate every effect of every cause, then ‘nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes’. By mathematically showing that there was no need in the astronomical world even for Newton’s Nudge God to intervene to keep the solar system stable, Laplace took away that skyhook. ‘I had no need of that hypothesis,’ he told Napoleon.

The certainty of Laplace’s determinism eventually crumbled in the twentieth century under assault from two directions – quantum mechanics and chaos theory. At the subatomic level, the world turned out to be very far from Newtonian, with uncertainty built into the very fabric of matter. Even at the astronomical scale, Henri Poincaré discovered that some arrangements of heavenly bodies resulted in perpetual instability. And as the meteorologist Edward Lorenz realised, exquisite sensitivity to initial conditions meant that weather systems were inherently unpredictable, asking, famously, in the title of a lecture in 1972: ‘Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?’

But here’s the thing. These assaults on determinism came from below, not above; from within, not without. If anything they made the world a still more Lucretian place. The impossibility of forecasting the position of an electron, or the weather a year ahead, made the world proof against the confidence of prognosticators and experts and planners.