Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!gatech!bbn!bbn.com!mesard 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> Sender: news@bbn.COM Lines: 25 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