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The Dome

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John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh PA 15260. Homepage: www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton This page is available at www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/goodies This page is based on Section 3 "Acausality in Classical Physics" of "Causation as Folk Science," Philosophers' Imprint Vol. 3, No. 4 http://www.philosophersimprint.org/003004/; to be reprinted in H. Price and R. Corry, Causation and the Constitution of Reality. Oxford University Press. While exotic theories like quantum mechanics and general relativity violate our common expectations of causation and determinism, one routinely assumes that ordinary Newtonian mechanics will violate these expectations only in extreme circumstances if at all. That is not so. Even quite simple Newtonian systems can harbor uncaused events and ones for which the theory cannot even supply probabilities. Because of such systems, ordinary Newtonian mechanics cannot license a principle or law of causality. Here is

The Dome The Dome: A Simple Violation of Determinism in Newtonian Mechanics John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh PA 15260. Homepage: www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton This page is available at www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/goodies This page is based on Section 3 "Acausality in Classical Physics" of "Causation as Folk Science," Philosophers' Imprint Vol. 3, No. 4 http://www.philosophersimprint.org/003004/ ; to be reprinted in H. Price and R. Corry, Causation and the Constitution of Reality. Oxford University Press. While exotic theories like quantum

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