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Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Laplacian predictability

A new paper on The Incomputable Alan Turing says:
The last century saw dramatic challenges to the Laplacian predictability which had underpinned scientific research for around 300 years. Basic to this was Alan Turing’s 1936 discovery (along with Alonzo Church) of the existence of unsolvable problems.
He is referring to Laplace's demon. Did that silly idea really underpin scientific research for 300 years?

Laplace was wrong about predictability for many reasons, and most of them have nothing to do with Turing. We never had a strongly predictable theory of particles, and they would be chaotic even if we did.

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