Indeterminism, causality and information: Has physics ever been deterministic?

Abstract

A tradition handed down among physicists maintains that classical physics is a perfectly deterministic theory capable of predicting the future with absolute certainty, independently of any interpretations. It also tells that it was quantum mechanics that introduced fundamental indeterminacy into physics. We show that there exist alternative stories to be told in which classical mechanics, too, can be interpreted as a fundamentally indeterministic theory. On the one hand, this leaves room for the many possibilities of an open future, yet, on the other, it brings into classical physics some of the conceptual issues typical of quantum mechanics, such as the measurement problem. We discuss here some of the issues of an alternative, indeterministic classical physics and their relation to the theory of information and the notion of causality.

8 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Classical and intuitionistic mathematical languages shape our understanding of time in physics
• Comment on "Physics without determinism: Alternative interpretations of classical physics", Phys. Rev. A, 100:062107, Dec 2019
• Reply to a "Comment on 'Physics without determinism: Alternative interpretations of classical physics' "

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• The Undecidable Charge Gap and the Oil Drop Experiment
• On the significance of Wigner's Friend in contexts beyond quantum foundations
• Indeterministic finite-precision physics and intuitionistic mathematics