Can History Be Changed?

I have never taken seriously any doctrine of history which guarantees some end. By "end,"  I mean a goal or purpose, not a particular sequence of events. In traditional philosophy, an end is a value. I deny there is any latent value in all that happens. In the long run, nothing matters.

The view I expound is the Universe is chaotic. That means it is disordered, possibly utterly random. Mine is not a new outlook, since philosophers before and after Heraclitus entertained similar positions. Nonetheless, intelligent creatures can always assign an order to the Universe because it is finite. Everything finite has at least one order, for the simple reason the components can be selected according to the laws of permutations and combinations. "Finite" means limited, enummerated, discrete; corpuscular. Finite is opposed to infinite, unlimited, continuous, not discrete; sheer evanescence.

In science, Quantum Mechanics is about the Universe of discrete things ("quanta"). Newtonian Mechanics and Einsteinian Relativity is also about discrete things ("bodies") embedded in and interacting with continuous space. That is what confounds simple answers to questions about history: even in our best science, there are two, different and opposed philosophies. Yet, somehow, they coexist. Einstein and other geniuses have tried to reconcile these apparent oppositions without success. This is a very hard problem.

My solution - although I grant it is probably not the solution - to part of the problem is that we have differing descriptions of whatever is our experience of Nature. Thus, Einstein's Relativity does away with the Aristotelian causes and Newton's mechanics: there are no "connections" between things, only observations in space-time. "Cause" can be thrown away, and so can "force." Unfortunately and strangely, Quantum Mechanics brings back connectedness, as in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The quantized stuff of the Universe is chaotic and randomized, yet somehow each parcel of stuff "knows" what certain other stuff is doing. This is the sort of thing we commonly observe when light is diffracted into rainbows or interference patterns. Interference requires interaction. I think the problem lies not in what the Universe is, but how we experience it.

The appearance of order in a Universe founded on chaos seems contradictory, even impossible. But it is obviously not impossible: based on everything we now know, that is the fact of the matter. At the most fundamental level, the stuff of our Universe - energy and matter - behaves as described in Quantum Mechanics, a theory which is statistical in nature. If the theory accurately reflects Nature, all that interacts is merely a matter of probability; i.e., both the existence and behavior of everything is statistical. It is only the Pauli Exclusion Principle (two things cannot share the same orbit and spin) which makes possible solidity. In other words, we discovered a few, very subtle principles which make possible the order we know, such as bodies. There is nothing in those principles which directly imply our sort of Universe, but their effect is to generate the underlying behavior which makes it possible.

Note: The reductionist/constructivist logic of science assumes larger structures are made of smaller structures. The made-up whole can be reduced to an interaction of its parts.
 

The stickiness of matter and energy - the gravity which binds all the stuff of our Universe - is a wierd exception to the other rules governing everything. So far as we know, it is not statistical or discontinuous. Yet, if gravity is a property of the basic stuff, which itself comes in packets, then gravity must also be quantized. Einstein's escape from that view is to propose an influence of space-time, a Universal Framework in which bodies and their interactons appear; i.e., there is no "gravity." The most difficult concept in Relativity is that gravity is a fiction, just a way of describing the interactions of things in space-time. Of course, that leaves us with the problem, what is space-time? Einstein was a Platonist, as are many physicists who prefer to believe there is some underlying reality of space-time. That belief is uncomfortably close to the Victorian notion of 'aether,' an invisible, mysterious vapor, like the surface of water without the water (or, the sound of one hand clapping).

The reason to look for a quantum theory of gravity is simple enough: to attach gravity to the quanitized particles and waves which are the stuff of this Universe. In making that attachment, we can dispose of ethers and space-times or other invisible breaths of the gods. Quantum Gravity would make the stickiness of stuff an obvious property of stuff, not an interaction which is always in-between. The problem with Newton's Gravity and Einstein's space-time is exactly that they are 'things in themselves,' things that cannot be directly observed, but are only known by their effects. Thus we attribute the fall of the apple to gravity, and the exact precession of Mercury's orbit to space-time. That is not all like attributing the solidty of matter to the Pauli Exclusion Principle, because solidity is traceable to specific bits of things such as electrons. Of course, it can be argued that the orbits of electrons or Mercury are equally mysterious in so far as we attribute those motions to Laws of Nature. The retort is, of course, that we do not attribute motions to those laws; rather, the Laws are reports of our observations and theories. The actual bodies do whatever they do. Nevertheless, there is a difference in the attributions, because electron spins and orbitals are directly observable, whereas space-time is not. (In quantized gravity, the basic entities exchange "gravitons.")

The upshot of the foregoing discussion is that one can assume the Universe is born in chaos yet still has order. This does not imply there are any real ordering forces or agents at work, only that the stuff itself has peculiar properties resulting in ordered structures. Electrons bounce off each other, resulting in solidity. But, there didn't have to be a lot of electrons in our world, there didn't have to be galactic dust clouds, star systems, planets, air, earth or water. In fact, at least fully a third of our Universe seems filled with Dark Matter, which is not observable except by its gravitional effects. No one  knows what that stuff "is." So, the orderly Universe of our common daily experience cannot be all there is, or even taken as generally representative of how things are everywhere else. Chaos and order coexist seemlessly.

In any Universe that has an arrow of Time, retrospective history cannot be changed even if, in principle, past history could be repeated. (That's what we mean by an 'arrow of time.') I analysed the memory problem in GSQ, which is the same problem as repetition. It is very difficult to repeat any but the simplest events exactly, because of the enormous number of parts and the even larger number of interactions. That is why Physics and Chemistry study boringly simple things like hydrogen atoms and rolling balls: even these are amazingly complex. Added to complexity and obscurity is the problem of chaotic behavior: each event is the confluence of statistics, an interference pattern of waves. To fully recreate an event requires generation of (possibly) infinite sheets of energy which intersect in space-time, which, as far as I know, is impossible. Recreation of events is limited by our resources, the necessity of using the matter-energy now present to replicate some other event, complicated by the Entropic loss of information (nothing is 100%). So, even repetition of history is at best incomplete.

In asking whether history can be changed, I meant to ask about the future, not the past. I think that orientation is usually implied, because it is taken as granted that the past is immutable, thanks to the Arrow of Time. The past should warn us about prospective history, as, hypothetically, the same factors apply in creating and recreating events. There are limits on controlling futures because events are intersections of an infinity of probabilities, and because Entropy guarantees something will always go wrong. "The best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray," as the Bard said. Thus, before considering any human vulnerabilties or limits of intellect, whatever control of the future we have is already problematic. A human desire to change (prospective) history flies in the face of the workings of our Universe.

Changing prospective history makes more sense in a Newtonian Universe, where presumably the clockwork can be adjusted. That notion is the root of a Deist reconciliation of traditional religion and science: the Prime Mover invents a clockwork, winds it up, sets it in motion and fades into the background. That is an easy, modern scheme which comports with our everyday use of machines. It is, however, hopelessly out of synch with Quantum Mechanics and, even, General Relativity (as discussed above). In the chaotic Universe, there are no clockworks, no springs and no buttons or dials; it's more like the air inside a balloon only temporaily contained by a thin, nearly invisible skin. Without the mechanical Newtonian world of our Enlightenment and Victorian predecessors, changing history becomes a very difficult concept and feat. It is to grab a piece of thin air and somehow transmute it.

This resistance of stuff to predictive control implies even our science is limited. According to Grand Unification Theories (GUTs), the Universe began with a Big Bang. But, does it end with a whimper (endless expansion)? Or a Big Scream (implosion)? Or never? Scientific theories seem to accommodate any of those answers, which is subtle way of saying "we don't know." So, it is prudent to accept science as a short-to-medium term body of knowledge. We will have a better idea of how things actually work only by living long enough to find out.

The quarrelsome purpose of my comments is this: the foregoing undermines deterministic or causal theories of history, and minimizes the role of any Heroes in History (i.e., human history). Philosophers who want an ordered progression in History, whether Aristotelian (Spencerian) or Hegelian, have to propose some motivation, an end, of it all. Without purpose, it is not easy to conceive and construct any machine corresponding to Universal History. Machines, at least as humans understand them, are organized collections of parts and movements. Even fantastic, improbable Rube Goldberg machines follow the "do this, get that" model in their sub-assemblies and the whole. Purpose and organization are inseparable reflections of each other. But I believe modelling history mechanically is not only "not easy," but impossible. I classify mechanized history with perpetual motion machines.

Based on the foregoing, we have to put aside such engaging stories as War and Peace which propose to order History. In Count Tolstoy's telling, Napoleon was doomed from the start as he set himself against Russia and the Hand of God. There may have been seeming deviations from the final result. Napoleon may have won a battle here, a skirmish there. He may even seem to have won decisively at Borodino, but, in reality, he lost. The natural revolutions of Earth, in the form of the Russian Winter, defeated Napoleon and, a century later, Hitler. Would it were so.

We cannot know what factors "engineered" the outcomes in Russian in 1812-13 or 1941-45. Had Hitler listened to his General Staff, would he have lost? Was Stalingrad really necessary? Would some small difference in planning have changed the outcome of Napoleon's winter in Moscow? We don't know, and probably will never know.

Can we rely on Superheroes and Ubermensch, such as those envisioned by Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Joe Stalin, Adolph Hitler and others? Those are folk who have the character, the strong will, to impose themselves on others, to make it so. History is filled with them:  Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar, Attilla, Genghis Khan, Chen (the First Chin Emperor). They certainly left a trail of blood, if nothing else. But, did they really change History? In the large, I think not. What they and others did may have speeded up or slowed down whatever was happening anyway; that is all.