Laplace demon Concepts

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time

by Sean M. Carroll · 15 Jan 2010 · 634pp · 185,116 words

about computers, so he imagined a vast intellect. His later biographers found this a bit dry, so they attached a label to this hypothetical intellect: Laplace’s Demon. Laplace never called it a demon, of course; presumably he had no need to hypothesize demons any more than gods. But the idea captures

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don’t have the resources to perform the calculation.105 There is a deep-seated impulse within all of us to resist the implications of Laplace’s Demon. We don’t want to believe that the future is determined, even if someone out there did have access to the complete state of

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the puzzle it appears to be if it weren’t for the fact that the underlying laws of physics seem perfectly reversible; as far as Laplace’s Demon is concerned, there’s no difference between reconstructing the past and predicting the future. Reversing time turns out to be a surprisingly subtle concept

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concept isn’t “time reversal” at all, but the similar-sounding notion of “reversibility”—our ability to reconstruct the past from the present, as Laplace’s Demon is purportedly able to do, even if it’s more complicated than simply reversing time. And the key concept that ensures reversibility is conservation of

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system will involve, using only the information of its current state. Once you specify that list, Laplace’s Demon takes over, and the rest of history is determined. You are not as smart as Laplace’s Demon, nor do you have access to the same amount of information, so boyfriends and girlfriends are going

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, our ability to “choose” how to act in the future is a reflection of our ignorance concerning the specific microstate of the universe; if Laplace’s Demon were around, he would know exactly how we are going to act. A future boundary condition is a form of predestination. All of which may

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motivating quantum mechanics.) Part of Epicurus’s reason for introducing the swerve was to leave room for free will—basically, to escape the implications of Laplace’s Demon, long before that mischievous beast had ever reared his ugly head. But another motivation was to explain how individual atoms could come together to

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recognize: billiard balls, planets, pulleys. These things exert forces, or bump into one another, and their motions change in response to those influences. If Laplace’s Demon knew all of the positions and momenta of every particle in the universe, it could predict the future and the past with perfect fidelity; we

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of his complaint that “God does not play dice with the universe.”) If the Copenhagen interpretation is right, there could be no such thing as Laplace’s Demon in a quantum world; at least, not if that world contained observers. The act of observing introduces a truly random element into the evolution

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certainty, if only we could get our hands on it.201 Part of the glory of classical mechanics had been its clockwork reliability—even if Laplace’s Demon didn’t really exist, we knew he could exist in principle. Quantum mechanics destroys that hope. It took a long while for people to

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run the clock backward and figure out whether the book that had burned was this one or, for example, A Brief History of Time. (Laplace’s Demon would know which book it was.) That’s very theoretical, because the entropy increased by a large amount along the way, but in principle it

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, but it is a fine hypothesis; it explains so many things.” Rouse Ball (1908), 427. 104 Laplace (2007). 105 There is no worry that Laplace’s Demon exists out there in the universe, smugly predicting our every move. For one thing, it would have to be as big as the universe, and

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tiny error in our understanding of the present state of a system. I’m not sure that this argument carries much force with respect to Laplace’s Demon. As a practical matter, there was no danger that we were ever going to know the entire state of the universe, much less use

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and irreversibility and multiverse model and thermal fluctuation and true vacuum and vacuum energy determinism and Buddhism and chaotic dynamics and closed timelike curves and Laplace’s Demon and laws of physics and prediction and the Schrödinger’s equation DeWitt, Bryce Dicke, Robert dimensions directionality. See arrow of time disorder. See also

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, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin scale Kepler, Johannes Kerr, Roy kinetic energy kinetic theory Kleban, Matthew Kolmogorov complexity Landauer, Rolf Lao Tzu Laplace, Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Demon Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Lavoisier, Antoine Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory laws of nature laws of physics. See also specific forces and bouncing-universe cosmology and

Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

by Brian Klaas · 23 Jan 2024 · 250pp · 96,870 words

laws of nature? Drawing on that logic, Laplace came up with an intriguing thought experiment. Imagine you had a supernatural creature—now referred to as Laplace’s demon—with omniscient intelligence. It would have no power to change anything, but it could know, with absolute precision, every detail about every single atom

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puzzle, so it would understand why everything was happening and could therefore know what would happen next. The drifting soccer ball surprised Ivan, but Laplace’s demon—who could see clearly how everything fit together in the past, present, and future—would know the ball was coming when Ivan started to panic

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. For the demon, the world would hold no mysteries. Other scientists and philosophers reject the clockwork world of Laplace’s demon. It’s not that we lack understanding or the right tools to measure a clockwork universe, they argue, but rather that the mysteries of

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world, his computerized model had just twelve simple variables, such as temperature and wind speed. In that primitive digital universe, Lorenz played the role of Laplace’s demon: he could always know the exact measurements of everything in his imaginary world. Could he, like the demon, use that precise knowledge to see

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butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could trigger a tornado in Texas. Lorenz had inadvertently given birth to chaos theory. The lesson was clear: if Laplace’s demon could exist, its measurements would need to be flawless. If the creature was off by even one atom, its predictions would, over time, become

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a big difference, the universe will always appear uncertain, even random, to us. No matter the technological leaps we make, humans will never become Laplace’s demon. If there is a clockwork universe ticking away behind everything we see and experience, we will never fully understand it. Chaos theory meant that even

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advancements in the nascent field of probability, bolstered by titans such as Gerolamo Cardano, the Chevalier de Méré, Jacob Bernoulli, Pierre-Simon Laplace (of Laplace’s demon), and Thomas Bayes (who developed what we now call Bayesian inference or Bayesian statistics). As the mathematical tools grew, a greater proportion of the world

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objects behave in the universe most of the time—is deterministic. It dominated scientific thinking about change for centuries, leading to thought experiments such as Laplace’s demon, and a belief in a clockwork universe. But Newton’s laws don’t explain everything. In the last century, three major challenges to Newtonian

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Soccer Ball off Greece,” Global News Canada, 14 July 2022. “garment of destiny”: Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 16 April 1963. Laplace’s demon: R. Hahan and R. Hahn, Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749–1827: A Determined Scientist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). “before its eyes”: David P

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machinations of the gods, 22 chance and chaos as drivers of, 13 chaos theory and, 26 in contingency versus convergence, 15–16 interconnectedness and, 28 Laplace’s demon and, 23 time travel and, 6 uncertainty and, 12 chaos, 11, 12, 27, 73 Dionysus as agent of, 253 embrace of, 38 paradox of

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, 213 Kuhn, Thomas, 172–73 Kyoto, spared from atomic bombing, 1–3, 4, 7, 124 Langer, Susanne, 77 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 22–24, 107 Laplace’s demon, 23–24, 25, 26, 107, 227 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 174 leisure-time invention, 262 Lenski, Richard, 51–55 Lévy walks, 260 Lewis, Michael, 259 Lightman

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Pascal, Blaise, 107 past-present-future relationship: assumption of past as guide for the future, 106–7 chain-link past, 8 determinism and, 222 Laplace’s demon and, 23–24 present moment tied to threads from the past, 21 time travel and, 6 path dependency, 90–91, 148–49 pattern detection, 70

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't

by Nate Silver · 31 Aug 2012 · 829pp · 186,976 words

further than Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French astronomer and mathematician. In 1814, Laplace made the following postulate, which later came to be known as Laplace’s Demon: 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

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(and if we had fast enough computers) we could predict the weather and everything else—and we would find that nature itself is perfect. Laplace’s Demon has been controversial for all its two-hundred-year existence. At loggerheads with the determinists are the probabilists, who believe that the conditions of the

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chemistry and Newtonian physics that govern the weather fairly well, and we have for a long time. So what about a revised version of Laplace’s Demon? If we knew the position of every molecule in the earth’s atmosphere—a much humbler request than deigning to know the position of every

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we will see later, every hour is critical when it comes to evacuating a city like New Orleans.* The Weather Service hasn’t yet slain Laplace’s Demon, but you’d think they might get more credit than they do. The science of weather forecasting is a success story despite the challenges

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, Nap, 102 Laliberté, Guy, 318 Lamont, Owen, 361 Lancet, The, 206 language, 230 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 112–14, 242–43, 248–49, 251, 255 Laplace’s Demon, 112–14, 127 L’Aquila, Italy, 142–44, 148, 154–55, 157, 173, 476 Larsen, Bent, 268 Las Vegas, Nev., 10 housing in, 19 Laurila

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer

by Duncan J. Watts · 28 Mar 2011 · 327pp · 103,336 words

good or bad at it, but rather that we are bad at distinguishing predictions that we can make reliably from those that we can’t. LAPLACE’S DEMON In a way this problem goes all the way back to Newton. Starting from his three laws of motion, along with his universal law

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uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”7 The “intellect” of Laplace’s imagination eventually received a name—“Laplace’s demon”—and it has been lurking around the edges of mankind’s view of the future ever since. For philosophers, the demon was controversial because

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of information—something we don’t know—whereas the latter implies that the information is, in principle, unknowable. The former is the orderly universe of Laplace’s demon, where if we just try hard enough, if we’re just smart enough, we can predict the future. The latter is an essentially random

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Management. 6. Newton’s quote is taken from Janiak (2004, p. 41). 7. The Laplace quote is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace’s-demon. 8. Lumping all processes into two coarse categories is a vast oversimplification of reality, as the “complexity” of a process is not a sufficiently well

Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics

by Jim Al-Khalili · 22 Oct 2012 · 208pp · 70,860 words

4 Maxwell’s Demon 5 The Pole in the Barn Paradox 6 The Paradox of the Twins 7 The Grandfather Paradox 8 The Paradox of Laplace’s Demon 9 The Paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat 10 Fermi’s Paradox 11 Remaining Questions Acknowledgments About the Author Preface Paradoxes come in all shapes

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it just might be that time travelers from the future are indeed among us, but choose to keep a low profile. 8 THE PARADOX OF LAPLACE’S DEMON Can the flapping of a butterfly’s wings rescue us from a predictable future? “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” So said

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me first set up the paradox. The French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace devised his own imaginary demon half a century before Maxwell proposed his. Laplace’s demon is far more powerful than Maxwell’s since it has the ability to know the exact position and state of motion not merely of every

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imply that we must discard our ideas of free will, since our fate is already sealed? And how then do we resolve the Paradox of Laplace’s Demon? We can briefly compare this situation with the time-travel paradoxes of the last chapter. In that case, our past was fixed and known

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to us, but we had to travel to it in order to change it and force paradox. Here, Laplace’s demon knows the future, but doesn’t require time travel; it just waits for the future to come to it, and while waiting it can meddle

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scientific way of ruling out time-travel paradoxes is to insist that time travel to the past is simply impossible. But in the case of Laplace’s demon, no time travel is necessary; the demon cannot escape the future, which is heading its way even if it does nothing, so it looks

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to make free choices, our universe cannot be deterministic. It’s an appealing argument, but not necessarily the one needed to resolve the Paradox of Laplace’s Demon. To show you why this simple resolution is not sufficient, imagine the following scenario. You use the supercomputer to calculate the state of the

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it makes in predicting the future, and this means that its knowledge of the Universe is incomplete. The above argument is sufficient to rule out Laplace’s demon. But is this, then, all we need to say about the paradox? Not at all. In highlighting the possibility of knowing the future we

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intelligence. FREE WILL When it comes to what all this has to say about the nature of free will (and therefore about the Paradox of Laplace’s Demon), there are still many different philosophical views and the issue is far from resolved. All I can do is give you my opinion as

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description of the quantum world is correct or not, and we may never do. A FINAL SUMMING UP We have come a long way from Laplace’s demon. While the paradox I set out at the beginning of the chapter turned out to be relatively easy to resolve, it did lead on

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a direct impact on the world of the very large, particularly inside living cells, and possibly the brain. We may have resolved the Paradox of Laplace’s Demon; but in doing so we have not answered all these questions. 3 Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1814), trans. F. W

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded)

by Michael J. Mauboussin · 1 Jan 2006 · 348pp · 83,490 words

’s Dream Beyond Newton Sorting Systems The Stock Market as a Complex Adaptive System Using What You’ve Got Chapter 34 - Chasing Laplace’s Demon Evolution Made Me Do It Laplace’s Demon Interpreting the Market Investor Risks Chapter 35 - More Power to You Zipf It The More Things Change . . . Catch the Power Chapter

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many agents, each with varying knowledge, resources, and motivation. So a disproportionate focus on individual opinions can be hazardous to wealth creation. 34 Chasing Laplace’s Demon The Role of Cause and Effect in Markets [Our ancestors] must have felt uncomfortable about their inability to control or understand such [causeless] events, as

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moves risk focusing on faulty causality or inappropriately anchoring on false explanations. Many of the big moves in the market are not easy to explain. Laplace’s Demon Two hundred years ago, determinism ruled in science. Inspired by Newton, scientists largely embraced the notion of a clockwork universe. The French mathematician Pierre

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intellect nothing could be uncertain; and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. Philosophers and scientists now call this “intellect” Laplace’s demon. The notion that we can work out the past, present, and future through detailed calculations was, and remains, a very alluring concept precisely because

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,” LANL, LA-UR-99-6281, 1999. 7 Max Bazerman, Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, 4th ed. (New York: Wiley, 1998), 6-17. 34. Chasing Laplace’s Demon 1 See Michael Gazzaniga, “Whole Brain Interpreter,” http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~fle/gazzaniga.html. 2 Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of

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Kaplan, Sarah Karceski, Jason Kasparov, Garry Kaufman, Peter Keynes, John Maynard Knight, Frank Krugman, Paul kurtosis lack of representation Lakonishok, Joseph Laplace, Pierre Simon Laplace’s demon leader/challenger dynamics LeDoux, Joseph Legg Mason Value Trust Leinweber, David Lev, Baruch Lewis, Michael life cycle: clockspeed of companies of fruit flies of industries

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe

by Steven Strogatz · 31 Mar 2019 · 407pp · 116,726 words

astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace took the determinism of Newton’s clockwork universe to its logical extreme. He imagined a godlike intellect (now known as Laplace’s demon) that could keep track of all the positions of all the atoms in the universe as well as all the forces acting on them. “If

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the motion of the top forever. In this way, she put limits on what calculus could do. If even a spinning top could defy Laplace’s demon, there was no hope—even in principle—of finding a formula for the fate of the universe. Nonlinearity The unsolvability that Sofia Kovalevskaya discovered is

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, 86 Komodo, 292 Kovalevskaya, Sofia, 277–79, 280, 290 L La Chambre, Marin Cureau de, 116 Lagrange, Joseph Louis, 260 Laplace, Pierre Simon, 277 Laplace’s demon, 277, 279 lasers, xxii law of inertia, 71 law of odd numbers, 66–69 law of the lever, 28, 46 laws of motion Aristotelian understanding

Information: A Very Short Introduction

by Luciano Floridi · 25 Feb 2010 · 137pp · 36,231 words

Laplace. Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827), one of the founding fathers of mathematical astronomy and statistics, suggested that if a hypothetical being (known as Laplace's demon) could have all the necessary information about the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe, he could then use Newton's laws

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, at least according to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is the most widely accepted among physicists - computational determinism is not an option, Laplace's demon is a ghost, and digital physics shares its fate. A digital reinterpretation of contemporary physics may still be possible in theory, but a metaphysics based

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have information about all the previous moves or states of all the other players then the sequential game is one of perfect information. Maxwell's demon and Laplace's demon (Chapter 6) may be described as complete- and perfect-information single-player games. If only some players have perfect information, then we

Think Complexity

by Allen B. Downey · 23 Feb 2012 · 247pp · 43,430 words

be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. This intellect came to be called “Laplace’s demon” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace’s_demon). The word “demon” in this context has the sense of “spirit,” with no implication of evil. Discoveries in the 19th and

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Thinking, Explanatory Models L label attribute, Representing Graphs labelling nodes, Dijkstra lambda calculus, Universality Langton, Chris, Turmites Langton’s ant, Turmites Laplace, Pierre-Simon, Determinism Laplace’s demon, Determinism leading coefficient, Order of Growth leading term, Order of Growth __len__, Hashtables Life, Implementing Life LifeViewer, Implementing Life line, Fractals linear algorithm, Summing

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

by Steven Pinker · 13 Feb 2018 · 1,034pp · 241,773 words

the climate or sorting millions of accounting records). The problems are different, and the kinds of knowledge needed to solve them are different. Unlike Laplace’s demon, the mythical being that knows the location and momentum of every particle in the universe and feeds them into equations for physical laws to calculate