Laplace's Demon

The concept of determinism can be traced back to Socrates and became incorporated into modern science around the year 1500 A.D. with the establishment of the idea that cause-and-effect rules completely govern all motion and structure on the material level.

"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."

  -Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace

This "intellect" has later been dubbed Laplace's Demon.

Newton's laws are completely deterministic because they imply that anything that happens at any future time is completed determined by what happens now, and moreover that everything now was completely determined by what happened at any time in the past.  It was supplanted by Chaos theory although the only difference is that chaos embodies three important principles:

· extreme sensitivity to initial conditions
· cause and effect are not proportional
· nonlinearity  -- Lorentz butterfly effect

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is often quoted to illustrate the impossibility of predictability but Schroedinger, Einstein, Bohm, Penrose and many other physicists have never accepted the claim that quantum theory disproves determinism. Moreover, nearly everyone agrees that even if quantum uncertainty is a reality, it can do no more than establish "random will", not free will.

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