The Earliest Missionaries of ‘Quantum Free Will’: A Socio-Historical Analysis

Abstract

The author tackles the problem of debates about free will from the socio-historical perspective that is still largely missing from the literature on free will. In particular, he tests the hypothesis that the belief in free will correlates with one’s religiosity and specific political or worldview concerns by the case studies of the earliest missionaries of “quantum free will,” as he dubs Arthur Eddington in Britain and Arthur Compton in the United States. They were not only the earliest, but also the most distinguished physicists in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s arguing for the “liberation of free will” with the help of Heisenberg’s famous indeterminacy principle. By a detailed analysis of their own writings, but also of the public reception and perception of their work on free will in the English speaking world of the time, especially in light of the struggle between “regressive” and “progressive” political and ideological forces, the author argues for the existence not only of the strong intrinsic religious motivation and specific conservative worldview concerns behind their own work on free will, but also of the similar factors, only of the opposite sign, behind the fierce reaction on their libertarian solution to the problem of free will, which, as he sees it, has never in the history of human thought been a purely scholarly and rational, but in fact always also a heatedly debated ideological and political matter.