I'm inclined to agree with you there, ModelBreaker. I think Laplace probably had a pretty wild sense of humor.
However, the (humorless, I'd even say grim) logical positivists seem to have seized on Laplace's statement as the model for their own method.
But as you say, truly Laplace was a world-class thinker, and his work on Bayesian probability theory was truly foundational.
Thank you so much for writing, and for your kind words!
Agreed. LaPlace was really describing God's perspective, not man's, although he might not have articulated it that way. OTOH, the logical positivists reenact the Sin of Adam over and over--eating from tree of the knowledge of good and evil to become wise, like God, with predictably tragic results. Having been expelled from the garden, mankind seems to spend much of its time trying to create Hell on Earth when, irony of ironies, Adam's sin is already redeemed.
His statement that (freely paraphrasing) "seeing everything, and having the intellect to analyze the data, allows for knowledge of the future" brings up an interesting difficulty that I recalled today, while reviewing an orbital mechanics text.
The immediate context was that, while the motion of a body subject to central body gravitation is completely solveable, an "imposed non-two-body acceleration ... will render the new system [of equations] insolvable." (Emphasis mine.)
The author's essential point is that imposing perturbations other than gravity leaves us with a trajectory problem having more unknowns than parameters to explain the motion in a closed-form way. (This explains why there's no solution to the n-body problem, for example.)
It's an interesting lesson on the limitations of mathematics as they apply to the real world. At best, Laplace's statement boils down to a statement of perfect measurement of an immense number of initial conditions; coupled with zero-error numerical prediction methods -- neither of which are attainable in the real world.
Agreed. LaPlace was really describing God's perspective, not man's, although he might not have articulated it that way. OTOH, the logical positivists reenact the Sin of Adam over and over--eating from tree of the knowledge of good and evil to become wise, like God, with predictably tragic results. Having been expelled from the garden, mankind seems to spend much of its time trying to create Hell on Earth when, irony of ironies, Adam's sin is already redeemed.