Does tint in a water glass move randomly?

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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

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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

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