Let's say we had a machine with infinite computational power, so time is not an issue, that knows all the laws of physics, and we feed it with enough data to describe the entire universe down to each particle.
Could this machine trace the interactions between every particle in the universe, and therefore "calculate" the future?
I mean can things like free will of humans and animals be traced down to interactions between particles or not? Is it theoretically possible to "calculate" the future?
Could this machine trace the interactions between every particle in the universe, and therefore "calculate" the future?
I mean can things like free will of humans and animals be traced down to interactions between particles or not? Is it theoretically possible to "calculate" the future?
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It would depend on whether free will actually exists or if the universe and everything inside it is predetermined.
What you are actually discussing is philosophy The Michael Douglas film The Game used this idea in it's plot. Because people respond in certain ways to certain events you can predict everything they do and the choices they make are not actually choices at all because their knowledge, experience, and physiological make up means they will only ever pick the expected one.
As for your machine... Well it is made from the universe and so can not contain all of the universe inside it and therefore can not be 100% accurate.
Could it predict the future? Absolutely but it's predictions would become less correct the further it looks into the future.
What you are actually discussing is philosophy The Michael Douglas film The Game used this idea in it's plot. Because people respond in certain ways to certain events you can predict everything they do and the choices they make are not actually choices at all because their knowledge, experience, and physiological make up means they will only ever pick the expected one.
As for your machine... Well it is made from the universe and so can not contain all of the universe inside it and therefore can not be 100% accurate.
Could it predict the future? Absolutely but it's predictions would become less correct the further it looks into the future.
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The butterfly effect says that unpredictability increases exponentially with the number of unknown variables. There are just too many unknown variables in real life. When predicting the weather, for example, every atom in the atmosphere is an unknown variable. At some point in the future, it becomes impossible to predict the weather. Imagine if some computer were given the position and momentum of every atom in the atmosphere, making weather completely predictable. All except for one, however, which was somehow overlooked. Not much of a problem, you might think? That single atom would quickly affect 100 other atoms, now making them unpredictable as well. And each of those would quickly affect 100 others. In very little time, every atom in the atmosphere would become unpredictable again.