If we let a tint drop fall into a glass of water, it looks like it spreads randomly.
But let’s they we could repeat the experiment under the exact same conditions (with the same glass, water volume, arrangement of water molecules, amount of tint, fall height and everything that could affect the equation). Would the tint drop spread exactly the same or would it still be random? Do we have any knowledge about the correlation of time and matter in an theoretical experiment like this?
In: Physics
Brownian motion…
It is the seemingly random movement of microscopic particles suspended in a fluid (liquid or gas). This erratic movement is caused by the constant bombardment of the particles by the surrounding fluid molecules, which are themselves constantly moving due to their thermal energy. The smaller the particle, the more noticeable the Brownian motion.
A cool tought experiment is that you could drop the same drop an infinite number of times and one of the possible outcomes would look like time was moving in reverse, it would look like the paint drop is coming back together.
Chaotic, but not random.
If you knew how every particle of water was moving around, you could predict how the dye would move. Even changing one of those values would change how the dye moves. In reality, that is impossible to do, so it is effectively random to us, but it entirely deterministic.
Cyber security companies use lava lamps to generate random numbers rather than a computer because the computers can be predicted, but the lava lamps cannot.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand
Yes. Think of the water and the tint as a bunch of tiny, invisible ants moving around. The ants don’t have a specific plan or direction; they just walk around randomly. When you drop the tint into the water, there are lots of “ants” in one spot. As they move around, they spread out to places with fewer ants, spreading the color with them.
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