Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!ucbvax!hplabs!otter!cdfk
From: cdfk@otter.hple.hp.com (Caroline Knight)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Randomness, the universe, and Turing machines
Message-ID: <2070021@otter.hple.hp.com>
Date: 21 Sep 88 14:10:55 GMT
References: <26154@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK.
Lines: 27

>
>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
>----------

Balls are only models of atoms - if the "real" (whatever that means!)
form of atoms is different then this argument has no substance.

All you have said is:

If one can model atoms by something purely deterministic like balls
then they are purely deterministic

Sounds tautological to me.

Caroline Knight
HPLabs, Bristol, UK