Published by Samuel Huckins on 02 Aug 2010
Laplace’s demon peeks over the horizon
During part of my time at St. John’s I did a lot of thinking on determinism, causal necessity, things of that nature. This became most conscious when reading what I found to be an awe-inspiring observation by Laplace:
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
—Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (Wikipedia entry)
I was stopped in my tracks upon reading this, for it resonated with a strong sense of things I’ve been possessed with for some time. From a variety of studies I had come to think that, with the enormous and perhaps insurmountable hurdle of “sufficiently advanced” technology, humanity might gain the ability to understand all past and future states of the universe. I won’t delve into why I was attracted to this, or what I feel now; suffice it to say I was plenty interested.