4 ms·
> non-deterministic kick Actually non-deterministic? Or just difficult-to-deterministic? Genuinely curious.
by spiderice 4y ago
> non-deterministic kick
Actually non-deterministic? Or just difficult-to-deterministic? Genuinely curious.
- kadoban 4y agoVery likely deterministic if you knew the _exact_ state of both the bullet and the air, but effectively impossible to know and likely not that easy to model correctly even if you did.
- jakear 4y agoSo nondeterministic in the same way an electron passing through two slits is.
- kadoban 4y agoI think slightly less non-deterministic than that, because there's at least some way you could know, if you were god.
- kragen 4y agoAs far as we know, quantum nondeterminism is real nondeterminism, not just nondeterministic because you don't know the exact state of both the electron and the slits. Presumably the Navier–Stokes chaos of turbulent flow will eventually amplify quantum fluctuations (where two molecules do or don't interact) into macroscopically divergent fluid dynamic behavior, but I don't know if the relevant Lyapunov time is short enough to make a bullet's flight quantum nondeterministic.
- cli 4y agoI doubt it. The bullet movement may be chaotic, which means that tiny changes in initial conditions will drastically affect the trajectory, but it is theoretically possible to predict the trajectory. However, it is likely that quantum effects such as the movement of an electron through slits is actually non-deterministic, so we can only predict it in a statistical way even in principle.
- verandaguy 4y agoNon-deterministic in the extreme literal sense. Our (turbulent) atmosphere is chaotic, and the transsonic shock is a fluid dynamics problem happening in that chaotic environment. Even with a perfectly still atmosphere it'd probably be fairly difficult to predict.