On 10 Mar 2013, at 22:51, meekerdb wrote:
On 3/10/2013 1:08 PM, spudboy...@aol.com wrote:
Question- I also thought determinism mean't that you could predict
where and when, a particle could move. But that Werner Heisenberg,
said that you could determine, on, but never the other. Would you
say that the universe is predictable and Heisenberg might be wrong?
Thanks.
Mitch
Determinism doesn't mean that you can predict everything.
Determinism means the future is completely determined by the past.
But in order to use that for prediction you have to know the past as
well as the time evolution operator. This is impossible for a couple
of reasons. First, you can only know about the past that is within
your past light cone. There are things happening on the Sun that
you can't know about for another eight minutes. If those are things
that can influence what you're trying to predict then you're out of
luck. Second, deterministic systems are not necessarily stable, so
infinitesimal errors in your knowledge of the present state or in
the evolution operator can result in large errors in prediction.
So even if Heisenberg was wrong (and there's lots of evidence he
wasn't and none that was) the universe still wouldn't be predictable.
.... the universe still wouldn't be predictable, by the observers
inside.
Bruno
Brent
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