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What caught my eye in this article was this sentence: "This is a founding idea of chaos theory, whose advocates sometimes say Lorenz helped dispel the Newtonia
by roel_v 7y ago
What caught my eye in this article was this sentence:
"This is a founding idea of chaos theory, whose advocates sometimes say Lorenz helped dispel the Newtonian idea of a wholly predictable universe."
Maybe someone more well-versed in physics than myself can comment: is it really so that 'metaphysical determinism' (so to say) is specific to Newtonian physics, and so, that it's no longer the state of the art in our understanding of nature? In other words, is there no room for Laplace's demon beyond classical mechanics? That would take the concept of the nature of 'randomness' beyond what I so far understood it to be.
- rwallace 7y agoMetaphysical determinism still works in relativity. It also still works in quantum mechanics if you accept the many-worlds interpretation. That's quite orthogonal to the question of practical predictability. What chaos theory shows is that, regardless of which model of microscopic physics we are talking about, there are important aspects of the future that cannot be predicted to high precision from within the universe.
- jmaa 7y agoThe word "predictable" implies "deterministic", but they are not identical. The universe can be governed by strong deterministic laws, while being too complex to simulate and thus predict. This poses some difficult questions for science, given that most science up to now has been about predicting something, trying it and checking whether theory and practice matches.
- roel_v 7y agoRight, but I took the comment in the OP to mean that non-Newtonian physics makes things 'non-deterministic', even is we leave aside the practicality of simulating the universe at the molecular (or smaller?) level.