Heinz R. Pagels Quotes
The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.
Pagels, Heinz R. The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature. Simon and Schuster, 1982, p. 86.
This quotation was from a mathematician who was in the midst of the expansion of mathematics in the late 19th century to include the then rapid and rich development of Probability. This required mathematicians, scientists and others who would use the new mathematics to think in a very different way. For the existing mathematicians his quote clearly states the dilemma for them. Today, scientists and mathematicians have little trouble with “laws of probability” and realize that Probability is governed and controlled in the same way as other fields of mathematics; they are comfortable with different results occurring under the exact same experimental conditions, and those different results are unpredictable in any particular instance, but exactly predictable in terms of frequency of each possible occurrence. This makes Quantum Mechanics rational. However, few non scientists have had their thinking expanded and are comfortable with this thinking. Law and public policy makers are particularly vexed by not being able to think and work in this paradigm where consequences of something can be described for a population precisely, and yet be impossible to describe for any particular individual. This will improve over time, as politicians and other community leaders become better educated mathematically and scientifically.
While this was certainly true in Ancient times, modernity has given us Public Health and other techniques that now enable us to prevent accidents. Automobile safety from seat belts and air bags are good examples. From a political point of view, however, accidents can and often do control the political landscape as in the unexpected death of a national leader. Often natural disasters are included in the general term “accidents” where the meaning is taken as that which is beyond human control.
Heinz Rudolf Pagels was an American physicist, an associate professor of physics at Rockefeller University, the executive director and chief executive officer of the New York Academy of Sciences, and president of the International League for Human Rights. He wrote the popular science books The Cosmic Code (1982), Perfect Symmetry (1985), and The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity (1988).
