The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism Sir Karl Popper
Rowan & Littlefield: 108 pp. F= ma. You probably saw and used
that equation in high school--or maybe you avoided the people
who did. Quite a few philosophers also used that equation in
philosophy's high school era, attempting to prove that
everything can be explained with just those four symbols. You
have grown up, realizing there is more to life than physics: se,
literature, politics, guns, butter, Steve's Ice Cream, and maybe
one or two other things. Likewise, philosophers now see that you
cannot quite figure out the cosmos by thinking of it as a lot of
particles--unless maybe you add Murphy's Law to the standard
rules of classical physics. In The Open Universe, philosopher
Karl Popper searches for that crucial ingredient whose absence
keeps us from reducing the world's problems to perturbations in
an atom's trajectory. Written 25 years ago--though only
published last year--The Open Universe attacks Einstein's theory
of determinism, which hold