Progress and Purpose Grant me the grace, O merciful God, to desire ardently all that is pleasing to Thee, to examine it prudently, to acknowledge it truthfully, and to accomplish it perfectly, for the praise and glory of Thy name. Amen. Regina Cœli Academy Natural Philosophy – Physics Lecturer: Mr. Alan Aversa Prayer of St. Thomas which he was accustomed to recite everyday before the image of Jesus Christ. 05/02/12 A.M.D.G. 1 05/02/12 A.M.D.G. Finality Organizes Motion ● Order in nature ⇔ final causality ● Efficient causes need a final cause. ● ● Finality Makes for Progress ● 05/02/12 ● “[F]inality explains progress without divinizing it.” Tendencies that deny progress – ● ● Modern views of chance ● ● ● ● ● A.M.D.G. 3 Aquinas: Final causes is “cause of causes.” 05/02/12 ● ● Whitehead: “God, in his ‘consequent nature,’ is the product” of cosmic motion. 4 No finality ⇒ no progress, no motion Modern mind says: “Universe governed by chance alone.” ● Alexander: God is a “nisus” (impulse, tendency). Hartshorne: God, “the self-surpassing surpasser of all,” is effected by the world’s processes. To explain physical bodies, Descartes’s physics looks inside bodies only and neglects final causes. – ● ● 5 Chance, spontaneity, indeterminism, and atomism Empiriological physics cannot grasp tendencies toward ends ● Just as Motor causality ⇒ Prime Mover, so, too, does Final causality ⇒ Supreme Designer. A.M.D.G. A.M.D.G. Modern Premises Conclude to Chance World Yet God cannot make nature fashion Himself; ∴, God is the cosmos’s final cause. 05/02/12 “The efficient cause cannot wholly explain progress.” Defense of the realism of progress and purpose Some contemporary systems: God is not the goal of nature’s motions, but its final product. ● It seems so ∵ motion starts with potency and ends in act. Answer: “This higher rung which things naturally attain from a lower one can be clarified by final causality.” God is the Goal of Nature’s Motions ● Viz., does the greater or more come from the less? – Progressive character of the universe – ● “Does progress imply that there is more to the effect than to the cause?” ● Without final causality one resorts to explaining order with chance. Lecture outline: ● 2 05/02/12 Inertia ⇒ lack of tendencies. Method of control (experimentation) does not allow tendencies to manifest themselves. A.M.D.G. 6 Inertialism Suggests Chance ● ● Inertialism ⇒ chance universe ∵ an ∞ series of inertial movers could never generate motion. ● Chance is a “rare deviation,” not an absolute disorder. ● Chances comes from outside the nature which it affects. ● ● Inertialism Suggests Chance “It would have to stand without a relation, or rather with all its relations outside. But, since a thing must be determined by the relations in which it stands, the absolutely contingent would thus be utterly determined from the outside. And so, by consequence, chance would involve complete internal dissipation.” ● A cause of chance is not unified, but plural; so, pluralism ⇒ chance universe. Chance is extrinsic to a natural agent. Aristotle’s term for a chance event: αὐτόματον (automaton), root of English word “automatic” ● Literally, “by nature vain” ● An automaton is a machine. —Bradley, Appearance and Reality ● “[W]hatever is ‘utterly determined from the outside’ would be ‘absolutely contingent.’” 05/02/12 ● A.M.D.G. 7 Empiriological Physics Emphasizes the Statistical ● ● – Chance is spontaneous, self-moved, beyond nature, automatic. 05/02/12 ● What is statistics? ● Infer from a small sample the properties of a whole population – Coin toss example: – “Part” would be an individual flip of the coin – “Whole” would be an ensemble of flips ● ● ● ● 9 05/02/12 Empiriological Physics Emphasizes the Statistical ● Deductive statistics in empiriological physics ● ● ● ● Physicists can deduce, from the pressure exerted on the walls of the chamber, the average energy of each molecule in the gas. ● Average distance a gas particle travels before colliding (mean free path) ● Number of particles hitting chamber wall per second ● Radioactive decay: half-life 05/02/12 ● Statistics does not say which atoms of a radioactive sample will decay. A.M.D.G. ● 11 10 e.g., of specific molecules in a gas Quantum mechanics and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle ⇒ nature indeterminate ● The empiriological physicist “cannot forecast the fate of individuals.” A.M.D.G. Classical physics used statistics due to a lack of knowledge of particulars. ● Average velocity of particles in a gas – ● ● Empiriological physics applies statistics: This does not tell us the result of an individual toss. Quantum Mechanics Tends to Indeterminism Gas in chamber example: – e.g., 10,000 throws Coin toss example again (10,000 flips ⇒ ~5,000 heads and ~5,000 tails): – A.M.D.G. heads or tails Going from whole to part (deduction) not accurate e.g., from a small opinion poll one could infer what a whole population thinks about a certain issue. 05/02/12 8 Statistics is “a movement from the part to the whole” (induction). Statistics is “a way of measuring large quantities of individuals which single measurements would make too complicated.” ● A.M.D.G. Empiriological Physics Emphasizes the Statistical Laplace, Bernoulli, Boltzmann, Maxwell: Statistical approach to thermodynamics ● Mechanistic conception of nature ⇒ chance. Quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory. Max Planck discovered energy comes in discrete packets called quanta. Schrödinger devised the wave-function, a sort of “probability wave” that represents particle-waves. 05/02/12 A.M.D.G. 12 Thermodynamics is Allegedly Indeterministic ● ● ● Thermodynamics is Allegedly Indeterministic Law of entropy deterministic on macroscopic level ● ● On the microscopic level, empiriological physics says there are random events. ● Example: If it’s probable for one electron in an electric current in a wire to travel the opposite way, is it possible for them all to travel “countercurrent,” so that the current is now flowing in the opposite sense? 05/02/12 A.M.D.G. Boltzmann statistics 13 ● ● ● ● ● Quantum mechanical A.M.D.G. ● All particles have same energy ● Applies to photons and nuclei of atoms with an even number of particles ● Called bosons Quantum mechanical “assumes all particles occupy different positions” Particles’ energies are all different. Applies to protons, neutrons, electrons, and nuclei of atoms with an odd number of particles – 05/02/12 A.M.D.G. 15 05/02/12 Thermodynamics is Allegedly Indeterministic ● ● ● ● Bose-Einstein: Random distribution of wholes ● Fermi-Dirac: Equal repartition of differences ● 05/02/12 ● ● Odds are very small that this would happen A.M.D.G. 16 17 Empiriological physicist admits this possibility, but with a very small probability. Statistical physics says heat is the random movement of particles. ● Why don’t we see randomness at macroscopic scales, then? ● A.M.D.G. What are the odds all the gas in your room would suddenly travel in one direction toward just one wall? ● Boltmann: Random distribution of parts called fermions Thermodynamics is Allegedly Indeterministic All three statistical distributions postulate randomness. ● 14 Fermi-Dirac statistics ● “[E]ach particle can occupy all the positions in a given volume with equal likelihood.” – Eaverage = Etotal / N, where the Es are energies and N is the total number of gas particles Thermodynamics is Allegedly Indeterministic Bose-Einstein statistics ● “assumes that all particles in a collection have average values and that the value of the whole is equal to their sum” 05/02/12 Thermodynamics is Allegedly Indeterministic ● Classical The more heat, the more evenly distributed are these motions. Desk randomly floating into air or water on heated stove freezing? This is possible, but very improbable! There is no heat in a single atom. 05/02/12 A.M.D.G. 18 References ● V. E. Smith’s Philosophical Physics ● Please begin reading the first half of ch. 8 (Progress and Purpose). – 05/02/12 I will post PDF of the reading on the reginacoeli.box.com page. A.M.D.G. 19