Physical unknowables (Q2856492)

The author presents a detailed discussion of physical unknowables. He starts with a sketch of the prevailing role of determinism in history and the rise of indeterminism from the end of the 19th century onwards. That is followed by some remarks on how physical unknowables can be characterized in particular by using mathematical means like logic and recursion theory. The formal definition of unknowability in terms of the notion of unprovability was derived in the last century leading to the formal undecidability and its relation to algorithms and calculations. The ``deterministic chaos'', that means, the instability of the system and its sensitivity to tiny variations of the initial state, is discussed in the following section, in particular the \(n\)-body problem. A third group of physical unknowables occurred in the domain of quantum mechanics. The author concentrates his presentation first on the contrast between the indeterministic behavior of an individual particle and the deterministic evolution of the quantum state, second on the complementarity, meaning the impossibility of measuring two or more complementary observables with arbitrary precision simultaneously, and third on the so-called value indefiniteness, referring to the fact that no consistent classical truth table can be given by pasting together the possible outcomes of measurements of certain complementary observables. In that context it is shown that the last two cases also occur in the classical world. The article is closed by some considerations about the metaphysics of determinism and indeterminism in physics and other sciences. NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThe article is not easy to read and requires quite a lot of special knowledge but it will be appreciated as a thorough overview about the current state of research and the progress in the last decades, that is particular documented by a very extensive list of references.NEWLINENEWLINEFor the entire collection see [Zbl 1253.00009].