Determinism is generally regarded as one of the main characteristics of classical physics, that is, the physics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. However, an inquiry into eighteenth and nineteenth century physics shows that the aim of accounting for all phenomena on the basis of deterministic equations of motion remained far out of reach. Famous statements of universal determinism, such as those of Laplace and Du Bois-Reymond, were made within a specific context and research program and did not represent a majority view. I argue that in this period, determinism was often an expectation rather than an established result, and that especially toward the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was often thought of as a presupposition of physics: physicists such as Mach, Poincaré and Boltzmann regarded determinism as a feature of scientific research, rather than as a claim about the world. It is only retrospectively that an image was created according to which classical physics was uniformly deterministic.

决定论通常被认为是古典物理学的主要特征之一，即18世纪和19世纪的物理学。但是，对18世纪和19世纪物理学的研究表明，基于确定性运动方程式解释所有现象的目标仍然遥不可及。诸如拉普拉斯（Laplace）和杜波依斯-雷蒙德（Du Bois-Reymond）等通用决定论的著名陈述是在特定的背景和研究计划中做出的，并不代表多数观点。我认为，在此期间，确定性通常是人们的期望而不是既定的结果，尤其是在19世纪末和20世纪初，人们通常认为确定性是物理学的前提：诸如马赫（Mach）等​​物理学家，Poincaré和Boltzmann认为确定论是科学研究的特征，而不是对世界的主张。仅作为回顾，可以创建一幅图像，根据该图像可以统一确定经典物理学。