Читать книгу Quantum Physics is NOT Weird - Paul J. van Leeuwen - Страница 14

The influence of Newton's theory on philosophy and theology was enormous. With the right mathematical instruments everything seemed computable, and God could be sidelined in his creation regarding his direct intervention. And, of course, with God everything that had to do with church and religion. Some people who did not like the position and the demands of the church preferred that idea, as did Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French mathematician and astronomer. He is the one who replaced the geometry-based classical mechanics with analytical methods which facilitated mechanics calculations considerably.

Laplace is famous for his hypothetical demon ^[11] who knows exactly the starting positions, masses and speeds of all objects in the entire universe and is able to use this knowledge to calculate the course of all events in the universe. The demon is of course hypothetical.

The demon does not have to exist to confirm Laplace’s conclusion: all matter – including past and future – has ultimately fixed knowable properties and will therefore obey Newton mechanics for 100%. The universe becomes a gigantic machine, a clockwork where coincidence is vanished. According to Laplace, coincidence, as we experience it, therefore only exists for humans because they do not have sufficient information and computing power to calculate everything in advance.

His idea turned coincidence and man’s free will into an illusion. People, animals, and plants became nothing more than very complex machines. Which is an idea that is still strongly expressed by many in the current scientific community. Fortunately, our legal system is still based on free will, meaning that we basically assume that the offender did have a choice. The judge will not easily honor your lawyer pleading that weaving errors in your DNA caused you to take a grab out of the supermarket till. It is however striking that when something goes wrong in a company's administration, for example, when you receive a payment reminder concerning your own obituary, the computer will often get the blame. In that case we apparently grant it some free will.