The following appeared originally in a writers discussion forum, in response to a question on whether a sufficiently powerful computer could predict everything a human would do in advance, assuming everything was deterministic–and whether quantum interdeterminacy would interfere with that. What many people tend to forget is that “deterministic” doesn’t equal “predictable.” Let’s start with the classical formalism and then consider the quantum one. The equations of classical gravity are deterministic. Once you have the initial coordinates and velocity vectors for all bodies involved, the state of the world at any time T is uniquely determined. But is it actually…
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