Is it possible to predict the future?

Is it possible to predict the future 🤔🤔🤔? If the laws of physics govern the universe, we should be able to calculate everything that will ever happen right 🤨🤨🤨? Prediction: After viewing this video you will never believe a fortune teller again!😉😉😉

First of all, to calculate all future events you must know the exact present state of the universe, and that means the state of every particle in the universe 😮😮😮. And to make it harder than just figuring out the state of one billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion atoms 😱😱😱, even with a 99.999% accuracy you would still be off by about 10,000 billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion atoms 🤯🤯🤯. Feeling dizzy yet? 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

Okay for simplicity then, let’s try to perfectly predict the future of just three atoms. Easy-peasy right 🙂🙃🙂🙃🙂🙃 ? Wrong! This is because it is a chaotic system. Due to the complexity of the interactions in a chaotic environment, the little errors amplify over time, and even an infinitesimal change in the initial state of the system causes the later states of that system to go bonkers 😬😬😬 ! This is known as the butterfly effect 🦋🦋🦋. And since the universe is the most complicated system in existence, good luck playing god! 😵😵😵

Okay what if we had infinitely accurate measuring systems, and we make no errors at all 🔬🔬🔬 ? Future prediction achieved? Not yet! 👸 Ms. Universe has decided that it is fundamentally impossible to know the both position and mass of the particle with absolute certainty ⌖🤏𐄷, aptly termed as the uncertainty principle.

This is because at a microscopic level things exist as a sort of ghost-like particle 👻👻👻 that can have different momenta and positions simultaneously! Bizarre isn’t it? 😲😲😲

In fact, the very act of measuring a property requires us to interact with the particle causing it to collapse into a particular value 🔬🔬🔬. But this interaction also changes the other properties of the particle. For example to measure the position of an electron we may need to bounce a photon of light off of the atom ⚛⚛⚛. But this interaction actually changes the momentum of the particle making it impossible to know both at once.

So far you knew fortune telling isn’t real, and now you know why!

While you wait for the next blog to come out, here's what you can check out:

1. Double pendulum simulation

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