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army1987 comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong
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Twentieth? If you're talking about the first couple decades of it, yeah, but I'm pretty sure that, after quantum mechanics became widely accepted and before the relative state interpretation and similar were proposed, most scientists were not determinists, and many still aren't today (see the third column of this table).
I don't know the math of quantum mechanics. My layman's understanding includes the belief that quanum state evolution is deterministic (described by the Shrodinger equation). I may well be wrong about this.
Either way, my point was that before Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism, and the understanding that light was a form of EM, science didn't have anything like a complete description of physics. So it was hard to say whether physics was deterministic, even though the existing Newtonian law of gravity was. Once there was an attempt at a Law of Everything, even though it was refined over time, there was at least strong evidence for determinism.
Yes, the evolution of the quantum state is deterministic, but according to certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, after a “measurement” “wave function collapse” occurs, which is stochastic.