Edit: by predict the future, I mean predict every little event and it’s consequences in future, the human history and everything.
In: Physics
If you’ve ever played catch, you’ve predicted the future. People always think predicting the future is some grand feat, but we do it all the time.
Obviously, like covid, there’s somethings that are surprising. But you can still put together emergency kits and plans, because even if we don’t know exactly when we do know that bad things happen.
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.
Yes.
But the problem is you need to know the initial conditions of all the atoms/ sub-atomic particles in the universe which the Heisenberg uncertainty principle forbids.
On a large scale, sure we can. We know when our sun is going to die, or when the next sunrise it. We also know (roughly) when the next mousson/rain seasons will start.
We cannot predict small scale stuff like whether you take peanut-butter/jelly on your sandwich tomorrow or if you’ll take a bowl of cereal.
Yes, it is possible. The problem is how far into the future you want to see. We can track things and predict their movement, such as planets, galaxies, comets, etc…
The two big factors that make it difficult/impossible are the human factors and not having exact numbers/data.
Think of a person playing billiards. His shots are calculated beforehand to get the ball in the pocket. The difficulty is controlling force, angle, etc… If we were able to reliably calculate/execute that with a robot, you could make the shots very easy to predict.
It depends on what do you consider predicting the future, while you can predict physical events that do not require humans, for example due to our understanding of physics we have a pretty good sense of when and how will the earth/the universe die, but due to the unpredictability of humans, it’s nearly impossible to predict the “future” if it has humans involved.
So basically yes, you can predict the future when it comes to physical and cosmic events, but as long as humans get involved it becomes too complicated with too many variables
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