"Although the anti-causal inclinations of an Eddington (or a Jeans) are most pertinent... they were not characteristic for their milieu. Far more typical for British natural-philosophical thought in this period is that interpretation of the conceptual situation in physics advanced by Lancelot Law Whyte in 1927 in Archimedes, or the Future of Physics, namely that "in order to straighten out its atomic problems physics will have to take a hint from biology." This notion, casually stated in the language of the work-a-day world, had come to Whyte two years before as a most powerful experience, a veritable revelation. "...That just as the Solution of Relativity demanded a fundamental reconsideration of the so-called limits of Science & their absorption into Science & reconstruction & a new understanding of them, So the solution of the Relativity-Quantum problem might involve the problem of life in such a way as to throw real light on the relation of Religion, Art & Science." ...while Whyte anticipates a revolution in science, indeterminism receives no explicit attention...Whyte is simply unconcerned with that aspect of Weyl's and Eddington's views. And this seems characteristic... [of] how very far the British were from focusing on causality."
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Businesspeople from ScotlandHistorians of sciencePhysicists from ScotlandIndustrial engineersEngineers from Scotland
Original Language: English
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Paul Forman, "The Reception of an Accausal Quantum Mechanics in Germany and Britain," Weimar Culture and Quantum Mechanics: Selected Papers by Paul Forman and Contemporary Perspectives on the Forman Thesis (2011) ed. Cathryn Carson, Alexei Kojevnikov, Helmuth Trischler
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lancelot_Law_Whyte
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Lancelot Law Whyte
Lancelot Law Whyte (4 November 1896 – 14 September 1972) was a Scottish philosopher, theoretical physicist, historian of science and financier.
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