Even if you had perfect knowledge of the current state of the universe, knew all the laws, you still couldn’t predict shit. The reason is chaos, more precisely: There are no closed-form solutions to chaotic systems. To simulate them you have to go through all the time steps (assuming, without loss of generality1, discrete time), simulate every single of them one after the other, arguably creating a universe while doing so. And you have to do that with the computational resources of the universe you’re trying to simulate. Good luck. Chaos also means that approximate solutions won’t help because sensitivity to small perturbations: There’s no upper bound to how far your approximation will be off.
1 I can wave my hands faster than you. I dare you. I double-dare you.
Useful becomes useless quite quickly. Yes, we have useful predictions for the weather tomorrow. A week from now? Not really. Two weeks? Could just as well get your prediction from tea leaves.
And that’s just statistical reliability. Weather predictions are actually allowed to be wrong, when the prediction for tomorrow is off then people shrug their shoulders. Not really what Descartes meant when describing his daemon.
Even if you had perfect knowledge of the current state of the universe, knew all the laws, you still couldn’t predict shit. The reason is chaos, more precisely: There are no closed-form solutions to chaotic systems. To simulate them you have to go through all the time steps (assuming, without loss of generality1, discrete time), simulate every single of them one after the other, arguably creating a universe while doing so. And you have to do that with the computational resources of the universe you’re trying to simulate. Good luck. Chaos also means that approximate solutions won’t help because sensitivity to small perturbations: There’s no upper bound to how far your approximation will be off.
1 I can wave my hands faster than you. I dare you. I double-dare you.
First statement is a bit of an exaggeration, don’t you think? We already predict a lot with useful accuracy.
But I get that in some things, chaos inhibits useful prediction.
Useful becomes useless quite quickly. Yes, we have useful predictions for the weather tomorrow. A week from now? Not really. Two weeks? Could just as well get your prediction from tea leaves.
And that’s just statistical reliability. Weather predictions are actually allowed to be wrong, when the prediction for tomorrow is off then people shrug their shoulders. Not really what Descartes meant when describing his daemon.