Social and Physical Determinism

Sorry Jim Baggott, but I do not for a moment believe that soviet communist philosophy shaped postwar quantum theory .

While I can believe that some believers in social determinism felt threatened by the inherent uncertainties of quantum mechanics I can’t believe that anyone who understood the physics ever thought that there was any link in either direction between the questions of social and physical determinism.

It has been known since before the advent of quantum theory that randomness at the microscopic level can lead to virtually certain determinism of various macroscopic variables  corresponding to just physical thermodynamic and chemical quantities (let alone those associated with the complexities of biological or social sciences); and on the other hand it is also well known that a completely deterministic physical system can have behaviour that is so sensitive to initial conditions that even the tiniest amount of experimental error in the determination of initial conditions can lead to macroscopic differences of outcome that are effectively indistinguishable from the effect of an actual random macroscopic perturbation. [Laplace’s proof of local stability of planetary orbits (while famously eliminating Newton’s need to plead for divine intervention in the face of his own failure to complete that proof) applies only to a very specific class of models, and even there does not preclude wide divergence over time from starting points that are arbitrarily close in their initial conditions; and we now know of models which do exhibit such divergence in a fixed finite time regardless of the accuracy of those initial measurements.]

So I do not think that the political pressures that may have existed (to either underplay or overplay the role of uncertainty in popular press accounts) actually ever had any effect on the thinking of those who were concerned with the physical question of how quantum mechanics might or might not have local deterministic underpinnings.

Source: How Soviet communist philosophy shaped postwar quantum theory | Aeon Essays