Edit: by predict the future, I mean predict every little event and it’s consequences in future, the human history and everything.
In: Physics
The reason you are getting conflicting answers is that we don’t know for sure.
What you are talking about is called determinism, and scientists aren’t sure if the universe is deterministic or not. The physics of quantum mechanics relates to determinism, however the laws at this level are not yet well understood.
If the universe turns out to be deterministic, that will have a significant impact on physics, philosophy and our understanding of ourselves.
I’d recommend the TV show DEVS. It’s a one season mini-series. The central theme is heavily related to this.
Now if you take this question one step further and wish to keep yourself awake at night – does this mean we have free will?
Because either the universe is deterministic and we have no choice at all, or the universe is random and our choices comes down to pure randomness.
If this bothers you then West World has a good quote: “If you can’t tell, then it does not matter.”
It’s not enough to know just the laws of physics, you need to know the exact position and movement of every individual physical piece of the system. This is actually impossible, due to the uncertainty principle attributed to Werner Heisenberg. The more you know about an object’s position, the less *you are able to* know about its motion, and vice versa.
Think of it this way: you can take a photograph of a ball in mid-air, and you’ll know exactly where it is in he picture; however, you know absolutely nothing about whether it’s moving, or in what direction. If the ball is moving fast (or you have an awful camera), the ball might look blurry or stretched out in one direction: this gives you more information about how it’s moving, but its exact position becomes a little less clear.
tl;dr no, because we can never have enough information to make perfectly accurate predictions.
Something I haven’t seen directly mentioned is radioactive decay.
Based on the current understanding of physics this is truly random. With a given sample of a radioactive isotope we know that half will decay within a given time period, but we do not know which half, and a good portion of quantum theory suggests that there’s no way to know which half.
Prior to decay two atomic nuclei are, at the limit of our understanding of physics, identical. There’s nothing to indicate that one has a shorter timer until decay than the other.
So you have all these atoms all through the universe that can spontaneously, and unpredictably, change into another (predictable) element, while simultaneously ejecting either aN alpha particle (a new helium nucleus) or a beta particle (an electron) along with some intensity of an electromagnetic wave. If it’s part of a molecule the chemistry of the molecule will radically change, and any atoms hit by the high energy helium nucleus or electron can also be changed too.
If those atoms were doing something important, for example were the DNA of a cell or they could be the tipping point of a cancer developing, or possibly be the factor in a DNA change that leads to a mutation in the species offspring going forward.
No.
In quantum physics there is a concept known as the Uncertainty Principle. Literally it says that you cannot know the precise speed and position of a particle at the same time. This happens because to know something, you have to measure it, and to measure it, you have to interact with it. Even if that interaction is as small as a single ray of light, it will still affect the particle, and you can’t know for sure what it does afterwards.
In the full sized world, you can think of it this way: Knowing the future changes the future. If you predict something, then now your own knowledge has changed, and that will affect your actions and choices.
So knowing the future requires not only knowing the future, but also knowing how knowing the future will change the future, and knowing how knowing the future will change the future will change the future, and…. so on.
Predictions could theoretically be very very precise (99.9% or more) but 100% perfect predictions are not possible. The very act of making the prediction changes what will happen.
In all likelihood the universe is deterministic (we don’t know for sure yet) in that all interactions follow predictable laws of physics, however it’s physically impossible to actually make those predictions so from our perspective we have to treat the the universe as if it is not deterministic.
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