25 - Statistics and Physical Theories

Summary

Until about 1840, the theory of probability was used almost exclusively to describe and to manage the imperfections of human observation and reasoning. The introduction of statistical methods to physics, which began in the late 1850s, was part of the process through which the mathematics of chance and variation was deployed to represent objects and processes in the world. If this was a “probabilistic revolution,” it was a multifarious and gradual one, the vast scope of which went largely unremarked. Yet it challenged some basic scientific assumptions about explanation, metaphysics, and even morality. For this reason, it sometimes provoked searching reflection and debate within particular fields, including physics, over what, in retrospect, appears as an important new direction in science.

At the most basic level, statistical method meant replacing fundamental laws whose action was universal and deterministic with broad characterizations of heterogeneous collectives. Statistics, whether of human societies or of molecular systems, involved a shift from the individual to the population and from direct causality to mass regularity. In social writings, it was linked to bold claims for scientific naturalism. Statisticians claimed to have uncovered a lawlike social order governing human acts and decisions that had so far been comprehended by Christian moral philosophy in terms of divine intentionality and human will. Their science seemed to devalue moral agency, perhaps even to deny human freedom. In other contexts, and especially in physics, statistical principles appeared, rather, to limit the domain of scientific certainty. They directed attention to merely probabilistic regularities, the truth of which was uncertain and approximate.