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By Root 776 0

just as necessary as the revolutions of the Sun. In ignorance of the ties which unite such events to the entire system of the universe, they have been made to depend upon final causes for or upon hazard…We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situations of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes. The human mind offers, in the perfection which it has been able to give to astronomy, a feeble idea of this intelligence.

Just in case you wonder, when Laplace talked about this hypothetical supreme “intelligence,” he did not mean God. Unlike Newton and Descartes, Laplace was not a religious person. When he gave a copy of his Celestial Mechanics to Napoleon Bonaparte, the latter, who had heard that there was no reference to God in the work, remarked: “M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this huge book on the system of the universe and have never even mentioned its creator.” Laplace immediately replied: “I did not need to make that hypothesis.” The amused Napoleon told the mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange about this reply, and the latter exclaimed: “Ah! That is a beautiful hypothesis; it explains many things.” But the story doesn’t end there. When he heard about Lagrange’s reaction, Laplace commented dryly: “This hypothesis, Sir, explains in fact everything, but does not permit to predict anything. As a scholar, I must provide you with works permitting predictions.”

The twentieth century development of quantum mechanics—the theory of the subatomic world—has proven the expectation for a fully deterministic universe to be too optimistic. Modern physics has in fact demonstrated that it is impossible to predict the outcome of every experiment, even in principle. Rather, the theory can only predict the probabilities for different results. The situation in the social sciences is clearly even more complex because of a multiplicity of interrelated elements, many of which are highly uncertain at best. The researchers of the seventeenth century realized soon enough that a search for precise universal social principles of the type of Newton’s law of gravitation was doomed from the start. For a while, it seemed that when the intricacies of human nature are brought into the equation, secure predictions become virtually impossible. The situation appeared to be even more hopeless when the minds of an entire population were involved. Rather than despairing, however, a few ingenious thinkers developed a fresh arsenal of innovative mathematical tools—statistics and probability theory.

The Odds Beyond Death and Taxes

The English novelist Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), best known for his adventure story Robinson Crusoe, also authored a work on the supernatural entitled The Political History of the Devil. In it, Defoe, who saw evidence for the devil’s actions everywhere, wrote: “Things as certain as death and taxes, can be more firmly believed.” Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) seems to have subscribed to the same perspective with respect to certainty. In a letter he wrote at age eighty-three to the French physicist Jean-Baptiste Leroy, he said: “Our Constitution is in actual operation. Everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain but death and taxes.” Indeed, the courses of our lives appear to be unpredictable, prone to natural disasters, susceptible to human errors, and affected by pure happenstance. Phrases such as “[- - - -] happens” have been invented precisely to express our vulnerability to the unexpected and our inability to control chance. In spite of these obstacles, and maybe even because of these