3 ms·

Does this imply that if we knew the total state of the universe, we could calculate its future state? Basically, does this imply the universe is deterministic,

• lalaithion 5y ago
  The evolution of the wave function is deterministic. However, the observables of the wave function are not deterministic. So if I tell you the state of a photon moving toward your eye, you can determine the probability distribution of what color you will see, but not the actual color, because there's randomness during collapse.
  • FeepingCreature 5y ago
    (Alternately, there's indexical uncertainty in timelines, which rouuuughly comes out to the same thing if you handwave about game theory a bit https://plus.maths.org/content/playing-games-part-i https://plus.maths.org/content/playing-games-part-i )
• Filligree 5y ago
  It implies that the universe is deterministic, with the caveat that what’s deterministic is the universe as a whole, which includes umpteenillion extra “timelines” which we can’t see, in addition to our own. There’s remains indexical uncertainty, as we can’t predict which timelines we’ll see. The answer is of course all of them.
• komali2 5y ago
  Unknown: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/63811/is-the-universe-fundamentally-deterministic https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/63811/is-the-uni... Also, has been argued philosophically for thousands of years https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
  • GoblinSlayer 5y ago
    It's known that the universe is deterministic, just not all people agree.