Third UCLA Conference in History & Philosophy of Science

Determinism in the Sciences

Saturday, November 18
121 Dodd Hall

9:00	Background-Independence Gordon Belot, University of Pittsburgh Philosophy It is often suggested that the most revolutionary feature of general relativity is its background-independence. In rough terms, the idea is that what makes general relativity special is that it was the first theory in which space and time were actors rather than a mere backdrop. But it turns out to be a bit difficult to give a precise characterization of the intuitive notion of background-independence. I propose an analysis of this elusive notion. The analysis turns upon the notion of gauge equivalence, a notion whose interest and motivation is bound up with intuitions about determinism in classical physics.
10:30	Chance, Cause, and Purpose in Darwinian Biology Ted Porter, UCLA History Darwin sometimes referred favorably to chance as a source of variation, but this was in opposition to design. His opponents, however, read it as incomplete causation, or (in John Herschel’s words) “higgledy-piggledy”. Darwin and his followers rejected that charge and tried to free the theory of evolution from it, but by the 1890s, as the tools of probability and statistics were applied to it, the place of chance became more and more central. On this point, those famous antagonists the biometricians and Mendelians were moving in the same direction, and the role of chance in early twentieth-century biology was at least as pervasive as in contemporary physics.
12:00	Lunch
1:30	The Dome: An Unexpectedly Simple Failure of Determinism John Norton, University of Pittsburgh History & Philosophy of Science Because of the specific shape of the dome at its apex, Newton's equations of motion tell us that a mass at rest at the apex can spontaneously be set into motion. It has been suggested that this indeterminism should be discounted since it draws on an incomplete rendering of Newtonian physics; or it is "unphysical"; or it employs illicit idealizations. I analyze and reject each of these reasons.
3:00	Coffee Break
3:30	Norton's Slippery Slope David Malament, UCI Logic & Philosophy of Science My talk will be, in part, an elementary tutorial on the geometry and dynamical properties of Norton's dome surface. The goal is to better understand how the example works, and better appreciate just how wonderfully strange it is. I'll also consider the signficance of the example. I find it fascinating because it vividly demonstrates some of the difficulties that can arise when one attempts to apply Newtonian particle mechanics in circumstances where standard background differentiability conditions do not obtain. (It is essential that the dome surface has a singularity at the apex.) But whether the example provides evidence that the theory is indeterministic seems to me a question that is not entirely clear. At issue, really, is whether we should regard the dome + particle system as a well-defined “Newtonian system” in the first place and that, in turn, is not clear.
5:00	Richard Montague's Puzzlement: The Mystery of the Missing Physics Mark Wilson, University of Pittsburgh Philosophy I'll talk about some of the structural and foundational reasons that make it difficult to resolve questions like "is classical physics deterministic?" with any definitiveness. Many of these trace to the essentially macroscopic nature of the enterprise.

Further information to be posted soon. The conference is free and open to the public. Visitors can find further information by following these links: [Directions to Dodd Hall], [UCLA General Information for Visitors], [Hotels near UCLA].

Organized by Chris Smeenk and Sheldon Smith, sponsored by the UCLA Department of Philosophy. Feel free to contact us (smeenk or ssmith [-at-] humnet.ucla.edu) with questions.

2005 Conference
2004 Conference

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