Can it really be that everything you do is determined by facts that were in place long before you were born?
This is the question tackled by Jenann Ismael's book "How Physics Makes Us Free," published recently by Oxford University Press.
Ismael, a professor in the University of Arizona Department of Philosophy, said she is drawn to philosophical problems that interest the general public—hence the allure of free will, which has been discussed by academics and armchair philosophers for centuries.
When Isaac Newton wrote "The Principia" in 1687, he ushered in a new scientific era in which laws of nature could be used to predict the movements of matter. Newton argued that if we know the positions and momenta of particles that constitute any system, and we know all the forces that are impinging on them from the outside, we can predict with certainty what that system will do.
Newton's physics poses a challenge to our self-understanding, however, for the same laws that keep airplanes in the air tell us that in principle it is possible to predict what each of us will do every second of our entire lives, given the early conditions of the universe.
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