PROBABILISTIC VIEWPOINT
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(2) |
| ID | ◀ 2626 ▶ |
| Object type | General information, Epistemology, ontology or semantics |
Science in general remained mostly deterministic till late in the 19th century, a paradigm perfectly expressed by the famous Laplacian deterministic statement.
The probabilistic view entered, for example through BOLTZMANN statistical dynamics, as a more or less opposed complement to causal determinism. It appeared as a kind of stochastic legality, merely juxtaposed to rigorous determinism, in the worst case.
The first inklings that these dichotomic views were too simplistic came through POINCARÉ'S n-bodies problem, which showed that even celestial mechanics could not be absolutely deterministic. The trajectories vagaries in POINCARÉ phases space were the first indications that determinism and randomness were more closely connected than hitherto believed.
The chaotic behavior recently discovered in many phenomena has emphasized the existence of movements which are globally deterministic, but anyhow unpredictable, or nearly so. This is also the case with emergent dissipative structures, that depend on random nucleation at bifurcation points. As a result, it is now becoming widely admitted that determinism and randomness are inseparable aspects of processes and systems behavior.