Saturday, 27 August 2016

Can we predict the future ?

Source background
In "Death toll at 241 as search for Italy's earthquake survivors continues – live" Both Matthew Weaver and Paul Farrell are reporting in real time what is happening right now. Now, 241 people killed and 264 injured from the 6.2 magnitude earthquake (the latest update on 9:43 PM at 25/08/16).

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My Yes/No question is:
Can we predict the future?

My answer is:
No, and never.

"The fluttering of a butterfly’s wing in Rio de Janeiro, amplified by atmospheric currents, could cause a tornado in Texas two weeks later." - Edward Lorenz

Welcome to the 21th century, where or knowledge in mathematics, physics and computer is at the maximum level. Now, we can create a robot that can win human in Go. With this advance in such a technology field how come we could not predict the natural disaster. If we can get all the information of particles in the universe, we also know how these things interact and we can create the simulation. This is what Laplace's demon in the book A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities written by Pierre Simon Laplace- the great mathematician-suggests.

First, I am going to play devil's advocate to show how the argument work? I will introduce you on of the most awesome library in the world. "The Library of Babel". What Michel states in his Vsauce video, Messages For The Future. "Each page of this book is go through the algorithm which random a chunk of base-10 number which will be turns to base-29 number and the base number can be turns to characters (a-z and punctuation). And this mean all this content in the page is pre-determine. But there is the difference between the program permuting something unknowingly and people some meaning it"

And Yes there is a page contains my blog post!!!
Let's come back to computer simulation. Yes, chaos theory. In Wikipedia, Edward Norton Lorenz states that "Lorenz built a mathematical model of the way air moves around in the atmosphere. As Lorenz studied weather patterns he began to realize that the weather patterns did not always behave as predicted. Minute variations in the initial values of variables in his twelve-variable computer weather model would result in grossly divergent weather patterns. This sensitive dependence on initial conditions came to be known as the butterfly effect".

If we talk about the simulation that we cut some constant such as pi, Pi is irrational number. It got infinite number of digits. So how we should cut the minimal digits without changing the digit and how we can store all this number? Now, it seems impossible for us.

But does perfection comes from perfection? very interesting question to discuss in the comment/next blog post.

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Reference

Edward Norton Lorenz. (2016, July 9). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:29, August 26, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Edward_Norton_Lorenz&oldid=729071023 . 

 Laplace's demon. (2016, August 17). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:35, August 26, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Laplace%27s_demon&oldid=734838995 .

 Stevens, M. [Vsauce] (2015, September 23) Messages For The Future. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDrBIKOR01c

Weaver, M. and Farrell , P. (2016, August 25). Death toll surges as search for Italy's earthquake survivors continues – Thursday's developments. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2016/aug/25/italy-earthquake-death-toll-rises-to-159-as-search-for-survivors-continues-live. 


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6 comments:

  1. Anonymous27 August 2016 at 22:46

    When I studied at university in Earth and Universe subject, I learnt about earthquake causes and the way to predict. I remembered that Seismograph could predict earthquake in mostly situation. It can remind us that earthquake would happen in the next period but it couldn't stop earthquake situation. So people should prepare the way to survive by themselves such as, migration to another area for a while.

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    Replies
    1. Anonymous30 August 2016 at 22:21

      I agree that the nature's disaster might be accurately predicted by the technological advancements. However, people still cannot come up with the solution to deal with it or to prevent it. What we can do is just lessening the damages.

      Delete
    2. Anonymous30 August 2016 at 22:21

      I agree that the nature's disaster might be accurately predicted by the technological advancements. However, people still cannot come up with the solution to deal with it or to prevent it. What we can do is just lessening the damages.

      Delete
  2. Unknown28 August 2016 at 21:53

    Your topic is very interesting and it makes me think about people's life. I mean that, however, no one knows when we are going to die although now we have a lot of advanced technology to safe our lives, to live longer than people in the past. But we can't predict or know when we're going to die, and nobody can avoid from death. So I think we should do at your best with other people for today and everyday because we can't know what happens on tomorrow or in the future.

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    1. Peter AUA28 August 2016 at 23:26

      I agree with Oat. Although out understanding is constantly improving, we will never be able to compute everything as Laplace's theoretical demon can, and that demon has problems with quantum mechanics and perhaps other laws of physics of which we are increasingly confident. But I don't think this means that our lives are not fully determined by the physical matter that composes us. Nor do I see this as a problem.


      Oat's suggestion to live well today seems to me to capture something important. The better we can predict, the better we can plan and act to live well, but we can still do our best even with the certain uncertainty that is a part of being human, or anything else.

      But I'm not so sure about avoiding death. Perhaps one day we will at least be able to postpone that for much longer than the current 80 years or so that is now the average in developed nations. If that keeps pushing back faster than I keep ageing, I'll be happy.

      Delete
    2. Peter AUA29 August 2016 at 18:48

      Oops.
      I just noticed with this afternoon's invigorating coffee that I wrote "out understanding" in the first line of my reply above. I meant, of course, "our understanding," which makes a lot more sense.

      I was thinking of adding another comment, when that typo from yesterday caught my eye.

      But I think the typo was fully caused by the immediately prior state of the universe. I don't think that Laplace's Demon can do his calculations to fully predict the future because there does seem to be genuine randomness in the universe, which rules out the Laplacian type of prediction. However, I do think that everything that happens is fully caused by the previous state of the universe, including all of our actions, where the noun actions means "everything movement of our bodies, every thought, every emotion and all else that we can do or be in any way." I think that definition covers everything I want it to.

      And now I'm compelled to return to sipping my late afternoon coffee, perhaps with a bit of relaxingly mindless NetFlix.

      I hope your revised essays are coming along well.

      Delete

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