Whither Determinism?
Robert P. Geroch
Department of Physics, University of Chicago
Determinism -- the idea of predicting what will happen in the
future from what is happening in the present -- plays a fundamental
role in the way we think about the physical World. Not surprisingly,
then, it also plays a fundamental role in the theories we devise to
describe that World: special and general relativity, and even
Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics. But each of these
physical theories, in its own distinctive way, requires that
the notion of determinism, as originally conceived, be modified to
fit that theory. What finally emerges from this process is a far cry
from the original conception.