A great read:
“There is a strain
of physicist that likes to think of the world as settled, inevitable, its path
fully determined by the grinding of the gears of natural law. Einstein and his
heirs model the universe as a four-dimensional space-time continuum—the “block
universe”—in which past and future are merely different places, like left and
right. Even before Einstein, a deterministic view of physics goes all the way
back to Newton. His laws operated like clockwork and gave astronomers the power
of foresight. If scientists say the moon will totally eclipse the sun in New
York on April 8, 2024, beginning at 12:38 PM, you can bank on it. If they can’t
tell you whether the sun will be obscured by a rainstorm, a strict Newtonian
would say that’s only because they don’t yet have enough data or enough
computing power. And if they can’t tell you whether you’ll be alive to see the
eclipse, well, maybe they haven’t discovered all the laws yet.
As Richard Feynman
put it, “Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, ‘These are
the conditions, now what happens next?’” Meanwhile, other physicists have
learned about chaos and quantum uncertainty, but in the determinist’s view
chance does not take charge. What we call accidents are only artifacts of incomplete
knowledge. And there’s no room for choice. Free will, the determinist will tell
you, is only an illusion, if admittedly a persistent one.”