eli5 When it comes to probabilities of past events

429 views

When someone says “wow there was only a 30% chance of that happening!” But wouldn’t it be 100% because it DID happen and due to an (probably) infinite amount of unseen variables? In this way would this mean the universe is deterministic?

In: 3

24 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Probabilities are usually a stand-in for uncertainty. Usually when someone says something had “a 30% chance of happening”, they actually mean “given the limited information”.

But that stops being true when you get to quantum mechanics, as far as we can tell. There, there are true probabilities. There is no “more information” you could know that would allow you to know which measurement outcome would happen.

This is still potentially deterministic if the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, since then all possible outcomes do happen. The evolution of the wave function is deterministic and the statistical nature of measurement outcomes arises from self-locating uncertainty about which branch of the wave function you’re on.

You are viewing 1 out of 24 answers, click here to view all answers.