if everything obeys the law of physics, is it theoretically possible to predict the future accurately if we know all of such laws?

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Edit: by predict the future, I mean predict every little event and it’s consequences in future, the human history and everything.

In: Physics

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Not exactly. Our understanding of physics isn’t complete, but current science has established that subatomic particles don’t always behave deterministically. That is to say there are probabilities that a particle will do X or Y, and there’s no way to know which will happen until it happens. It’s a fundamental property of matter as far as we can tell with no way around it.

For everyday stuff on the scale of humans, it doesn’t make a difference. A person is made of billions and billions of these particles, so all that dice rolling going on at the small scale evens out and makes it look like everything is super predictable. Yet we still couldn’t perfectly predict the future because there’s just no way to track all those little dice rolls that could add up over long periods of time.

This is of course only speaking theoretically. The other problem is that if we wanted to do so practically, we would need to compute every property of every single thing in the universe. To do that you would require a computer made of at least as much stuff as exists in the universe. The only way to simulate something is to either use something bigger than the thing you simulate or to make some sort of approximations and simplifications, which introduces some error.

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