I don’t understand this concept of “chaos” in a universe governed by physics.
Just because something is nearly infinitely complicated, doesn’t mean predicting outcomes would be actually impossible. If the universe produces the outcome, doesn’t that mean it’s following a rule set?
Do I fundamentally not understand chaos theory?
In: 4
Whenever you predict something you first have to measure the initial state. Then you use the model to predict the outcome. However every measurement has only finite precision, which means there is always a margin of error for the initial state and therefore there is a margin of error on the predicted outcome. If small margins of error on the initial state lead to small margins of error on the outcome the system is well behaived and predicting the outcome is possible. Otherwise the system is chaotic and it is impossible to predict the outcome, no matter how precisely measured the initial state was.
In both cases you can actually perfectly predict the outcome if the initial state was perfectly known but perfectly knowing the initial state is simply not possible in practice.
Latest Answers