Edit: by predict the future, I mean predict every little event and it’s consequences in future, the human history and everything.
In: Physics
Yes.
But the problem is you need to know the initial conditions of all the atoms/ sub-atomic particles in the universe which the Heisenberg uncertainty principle forbids.
On a large scale, sure we can. We know when our sun is going to die, or when the next sunrise it. We also know (roughly) when the next mousson/rain seasons will start.
We cannot predict small scale stuff like whether you take peanut-butter/jelly on your sandwich tomorrow or if you’ll take a bowl of cereal.
Not exactly. Our understanding of physics isn’t complete, but current science has established that subatomic particles don’t always behave deterministically. That is to say there are probabilities that a particle will do X or Y, and there’s no way to know which will happen until it happens. It’s a fundamental property of matter as far as we can tell with no way around it.
For everyday stuff on the scale of humans, it doesn’t make a difference. A person is made of billions and billions of these particles, so all that dice rolling going on at the small scale evens out and makes it look like everything is super predictable. Yet we still couldn’t perfectly predict the future because there’s just no way to track all those little dice rolls that could add up over long periods of time.
This is of course only speaking theoretically. The other problem is that if we wanted to do so practically, we would need to compute every property of every single thing in the universe. To do that you would require a computer made of at least as much stuff as exists in the universe. The only way to simulate something is to either use something bigger than the thing you simulate or to make some sort of approximations and simplifications, which introduces some error.
Yes, it is possible. The problem is how far into the future you want to see. We can track things and predict their movement, such as planets, galaxies, comets, etc…
The two big factors that make it difficult/impossible are the human factors and not having exact numbers/data.
Think of a person playing billiards. His shots are calculated beforehand to get the ball in the pocket. The difficulty is controlling force, angle, etc… If we were able to reliably calculate/execute that with a robot, you could make the shots very easy to predict.
It depends on what do you consider predicting the future, while you can predict physical events that do not require humans, for example due to our understanding of physics we have a pretty good sense of when and how will the earth/the universe die, but due to the unpredictability of humans, it’s nearly impossible to predict the “future” if it has humans involved.
So basically yes, you can predict the future when it comes to physical and cosmic events, but as long as humans get involved it becomes too complicated with too many variables
If you’ve ever played catch, you’ve predicted the future. People always think predicting the future is some grand feat, but we do it all the time.
Obviously, like covid, there’s somethings that are surprising. But you can still put together emergency kits and plans, because even if we don’t know exactly when we do know that bad things happen.
No. Maybe you could predict anything that could ever happen in space (with the assumption that there is no intelligent life out there), but here on Earth a lot of events are shaped by human psychology and there aren’t all-encompassing laws or rules for that.
Also quantum mechanics and stuff. As far as I know (and I don’t know much at all, I’ve only dabbled), the laws of quantum physics have a certain element of randomness that can’t give you a definite/predictable outcome all the time.
No, and this is a foundational principle of Chaos Theory.
In a non-linear dynamic system (even a system as simple as a [double pendulum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_pendulum)), even a tiny difference in the initial conditions will have a huge impact in how the system evolves over time, even if the system is fully deterministic. The [three-body problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem) has been known about for a while.
An error in measurement will grow exponentially over time until the prediction is no better than if you had just put in the measurements at random (within the allowable values for the measurements). And because the error grows exponentially, how much your prediction improves doesn’t grow nearly as fast as how accurately you can measure the conditions. As the error goes to zero, how long the prediction is good for does not go to infinity, but to a finite value. And that’s before you throw in quantum mechanics, where the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle puts a limit on how accurately you can measure something.
So if by predicting the future, you mean “predicting every little event and its consequences”, then no that’s not possible even in theory. And things like weather forecasts now take that into account. Rather than making one prediction, they make lots and lots of them with tiny little variations in each one and see how each plays out. The actual forecast is then more statistical in nature.
However, that doesn’t mean that predictions are entirely useless because some types of outcomes are more likely and some outcomes are impossible. With the three-body problem for example, if there are two large bodies and one small one, the most likely outcome is that the small body is ejected from the system.
Not everything does obey the laws of physics. Well, in the physical and biological senses, they all do. But that’s not the point.
You’re asking about predicting human history. That’s not subject to the laws of physics; it’s subject to human behavior.
And human behavior is definitely not subject to the laws of physics. What a person can physically do (eg.: running, but not flying) and biologically do (eg.: consuming food, but not photosynthesis) are.
But how a person will behave is not. There is nothing in the laws of physics that could lead to the conclusion of you asking this question in the first place, nor is there anything there about me answering it.
This is a very interesting question. Initially we thought no, events like a coin flip were random and impossible to predict.
Then Newton came up with classical mechanics, which explained everything about how objects move. If you knew the initial state and all the forces acting on a system, you could calculate how it evolved over time. This explained everything we could see universe, with enough calculations you could predict anything. It was gradually evolved over the next 200 years until it seemed like we had everything figured.
Then of course quantum mechanics came along, and with it came inexplicabally random events. Electrons that could be in many places at once and were impossible to measure properly, systems that seemed to be in a superposition of multiple states. Einstein hated the idea, arguing that “God does not play dice”. But quantum mechanics is still the best explanation we have.
So right now? We don’t really know. There are several possible interpratations of quantum mechanics, some of them suggest the universe is truly random, others suggest it’s deterministic.
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