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To: tortoise

The determinism of Laplace fell to the realities of quantum mechanics. At the most basic level of the universe, subatomic matter is not governed purely by cause and effect.


1,276 posted on 07/29/2006 8:16:54 PM PDT by MHGinTN (If you can read this, you've had life support from someone. Promote life support for others.)
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To: MHGinTN

Laplace's determinism also fails due to the existence of molecules (Einstein, 1905 convinced physicists; chemists like the idea since Dalton.) Brownian motion is not predictable even with a Laplacian philosophy. The reason is that any probe small enough to measure positions of molecules (or even pollen particles) is subject to Brownian motion itself. A particle undergoing BM has no definible velocity. (This was found out experimentally.)


1,278 posted on 07/29/2006 8:50:07 PM PDT by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch ist der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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To: MHGinTN
The determinism of Laplace fell to the realities of quantum mechanics. At the most basic level of the universe, subatomic matter is not governed purely by cause and effect.

Only in physics currently, where unpredictable determinism is treated as though it was mathematically random. Last I checked it was well-established that there is nothing about quantum mechanics that necessitates non-determinism, and one can make strong mathematical arguments to that effect. The idea that quantum mechanics is fundamentally random is a common misconception.

Really short version:

Even a trivially simple deterministic systems can be intractably random to all observers in this universe if the only tool at your disposal is induction, and induction is really the only process science has. You can effectively treat such a process as "random", but it is still a trivial deterministic process that would be completely transparent if you could look under the hood. Quantum mechanics is like that; there are simple deterministic processes that we have not figured out how to look under the hood, and which appear to be utterly intractable by induction.

(ObTangent: cryptography is based on the same notion of processes that are completely trivial to predict by deduction but grossly intractable to predict by induction. In the case of crypto, they go one step further by openly describing the complete mechanics of the internal process but not disclosing key bits of state. In physics, we frequently know a lot about neither the abstract mechanics nor the state.)

1,281 posted on 07/29/2006 9:12:24 PM PDT by tortoise
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