The success of scientific theories, particularly Newton’s theoryof gravity, led the French scientist the Marquis de Laplace atthe beginning of the nineteenth century to argue that theuniverse was completely deterministic. Laplace suggested thatthere should be a set of scientific laws that would allow us topredict everything that would happen in the universe, if only weknew the complete state of the universe at one time. Forexample, if we knew the positions and speeds of the sun andthe planets at one time, then we could use Newton’s laws tocalculate the state of the Solar System at any other time.
Determinism seems fairly obvious in this case, but Laplace wentfurther to assume that there were similar laws governingeverything else, including human behavior.
The doctrine¹ of scientific determinism was strongly resistedby many people, who felt that it infringed² God’s freedom tointervene in the world, but it remained the standard assumptionof science until the early years of this century. One of the firstindications that this belief would have to be abandoned camewhen calculations by the British scientists Lord Rayleigh and SirJames Jeans suggested that a hot object, or body, such as astar, must radiate energy at an infinite rate. According to thelaws we believed at the time, a hot body ought to give offelectromagnetic waves (such as radio waves, visible light, or Xrays) equally at all frequencies. For example, a hot body shouldradiate the same amount of energy in waves with frequenciesbetween one and two million million waves a second as inwaves with frequencies between two and three million millionwaves a second. Now since the number of waves a second isunlimited, this would mean that the total energy radiated wouldbe infinite.
In order to avoid this obviously ridiculous result, the Germanscientist Max Planck suggested in 1900 that light, X rays, andother waves could not be emitted at an arbitrary rate, but onlyin certain packets that he called quanta. Moreover, eachquantum had a certain amount of energy that was greater thehigher the frequency of the waves, so at a high enoughfrequency the emission³ of a single quantum would require moreenergy than was available. Thus the radiation at highfrequencies would be reduced, and so the rate at which thebody lost energy would be finite.
The quantum hypothesis explained the observed rate ofemission of radiation from hot bodies very well, but itsimplications for determinism were not realized until 1926, whenanother German scientist, Werner Heisenberg,

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