10 ms·
How do you account for the fundamentally non-deterministic nature of the universe?
by Cushman 15y ago
How do you account for the fundamentally non-deterministic nature of the universe?
- akg0 15y agoFirst, non-determinism would have to be demonstrated.
- jQueryIsAwesome 15y agoThe problem is, all the things we don't understand could be labed as non-determined (i.e: quantum particles moving "randomly")
- Jach 15y agoThey only appear non-determined when you think of them as particles or waves. They're neither.
- akg0 15y agoI don't see how. "Not predictable given what I've observed so far" is a long way from "not predictable".
- jQueryIsAwesome 15y agoWierd... because i think those are the same.
- gmt2027 15y agoActually representing the entire state of the universe sounds rather ambitious. However, the very action of 'imaging' will force the entire system into a consistent state by quantum collapse. The universe will be represented but changed, the original multitude of super-imposed states will be lost. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle implies that some things are just unknowable. However, only the most basic constituents of physical reality demonstrate noticeable quantum behaviour. The macroscopic universe is fairly deterministic. You don't need to jump in front of a moving bus to learn that Newtonian mechanics applies 100% of the time in a very deterministic way.
- toadkick 15y agoThis may be a nitpick, but how can something be "fairly deterministic"? Is it possible for there to be degrees of determinism? I would consider determinism to binary, either something is deterministic, or it is not. If a thing cannot be demonstrated to be deterministic 100% of the time, then by it's very definition it is non-deterministic. By that logic, I would actually conclude that the entire universe does in fact behave deterministically. If it didn't, then I don't see how science would even be possible.
- gmt2027 15y agoI was avoiding an absolute statement because macroscopic objects are entirely capable of behaving in unpredictable ways, however the odds against are so high that the chance of this happening is infinitesimal.
- Cushman 15y agoBut Newtonian mechanics doesn't apply 100% of the time, right? It applies most of the time, from your perspective, because most of the sizes, distances and speeds you deal with are very large, short, and slow compared to their relevant universal constants. But there's a very long tail of very small, far, fast things that do concern you, and there, rarely, your "100%" approximation falls down. You say that the "macroscopic" universe is fairly deterministic, meaning things that are about the same size as your brain. But is that an observation about the universe, or about your brain?
- akg0 15y agoIt's an observation about the universe. Yes, things about the size of his brain appear to to have deterministic behavior, but so do mountains, oceans, moons, planets and stars - which are, needless to say, nowhere near the size of his brain. The appearance of "randomness" at very small scales can be explained as non-determinism, or as a deterministic effect of some property that we haven't yet detected. The point being that the universe has not been shown to have a "fundamentally non-deterministic nature".