Friedrich Waismann

The Decline and Fall of Causality

1. The year 1927 is a landmark in the evolution of physics—the year which saw the obsequies of the notion of causality. To avoid misconceptions, it should not be thought that the concept fell a victim to the unbridled antipathy of certain physicists or their indulgence in fancies. The truth is that men of science came, very reluctantly and almost against their will, to recognize the impossibility of giving a coherent causal description of the happenings on the atomic scale, though some of them—curiously enough, amongst them Planck, Einstein, de Broglie, Schrodinger—could never bring themselves to accept wholeheartedly so drastic a renunciation of classical ideals.