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From: mesard@bbn.com (Wayne Mesard)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Randomness, the universe, and Turing machines
Message-ID: <29891@bbn.COM>
Date: 20 Sep 88 21:31:03 GMT
References: <936@l.cc.purdue.edu>
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From article <936@l.cc.purdue.edu>, by cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin):
> A deterministic universe implies that all our actions, including this posting,
> are determined.  The philosophical implications of this should be obvious.

I knew you were gonna say that ;-)

But seriously, why does it seem so counter-intuitive.  If you put a
dozen balls in a box and shake it, the resulting trajectories will
seem--to the uninformed eye--random and unpredictable.  But given the
proper information [note I don't say observational powers and thus avoid
the Uncertainty Principle], one can exactly predict the paths that the
ball will take.

Now scale that model up by many thousand orders of magnitude.  Instead
of balls, we have subatomic particles and more subtle forces at work,
but the principle is still the same.  We may never haveenough
information to exactly predict events in the universe, or even a
reasonable subregion thereof.  But the inability to make the exact
calculation doesn't mean that the universe isn't exactly, completely
deterministic.

-- 
unsigned *Wayne_Mesard();    The last thing one knows in constructing
MESARD@BBN.COM               a work is what to put first.
BBN, Cambridge, MA                                      -- Blaise Pascal