well I attribute the socio-political factors responsible for this..When nature was viewed as deterministic, there was no other way to do science. In order to build science as a valid and trustworthy field of enquiry, and owing to a lack of any previous scientific methodologies, it was necessary in 16th and 17th centuries that science should be based on principles where one could determine the course of action of any phenomena over a period of time. So believing that a mathematical equation like F=ma would actually help us in predicting one variable through others, was revolutionary and somewhat surprising to believe. Being capable of predicting the value of variables through some givens was a motivating force in science and hence dominated the studies in science.
But this doesn't mean that universe behaved any differently. Laws of nature were already operational before Newton or others discovered them. What makes such laws valid and applicable is the paradigm which we use. Paradigms consist of our assumptions, philosophical principles, the tools and instruments that we make to measure nature based on those principles etc.
Since science has progressed in linear fashion, where new inventions and discoveries were based on early foundations, so it seems that we have discovered something novel in science. But the truth is that even at the time of Newton, nature was as probabilistic as it is now. What if we were working on both principles and paradigms since, say, 400-500 years. It was the limit of science that made us assume its nature in two opposing and distinct classes of principles and beliefs.
But, see , there are laws, like, say, Bohr's correspondence principle for determining the correspondence between classical and quantum principles. What is really interesting is that Nature behaving in two different yet surprisingly related set of ideas.
The "generally accepted axioms" of Quantum Mechanics can be proven in a very general context,without the need of assumptions about a supposed "non determinist Nature" . They come from the way any model used by physicist to represent the data from its experiments. So, "indeterminism" or "probabilistic behaviour" of "Nature" is a superfluous hypothesis. A matter of personal belief.
My answer to this question is 'NO'. It is neither of those choices. Nature is experiential and intentional. Classical and quantum are merely modeling systems. The determinism or probabilities produced by these systems can not be said to be characteristics of Nature itself.
Hello. I am Nature. I am experiencing you reading this line.
I very much agree to Frank Landis, but I think all of the contributors hat some ground for their opinions.
I mean, if you want to describe macro-nature then deterministic models (as in classical mechanics) work well (with relativistic corrections for extremely high speeds), if you want to describe micro-nature then probabilistic models (as in quantum mechanics) work better.
Bu the laws of nature DO NOT switch over from classical to quantum.
Nature behaves naturally.
It is the model what beyond certain limits does not hold, not the nature.
No, nature doesn't keep itself hidden. It starts out hidden. The more we experience it, the closer we get to knowing it. As individuals we can only see with our own eyes, but as a society, we have seen so much more. Knowledge is now the sum of what nations together know. What will we do to further grow our ability to experience beyond even a planetary scale.