Chaotic Musings

Chaos, of course, has deep roots — it is said that in the beginning, there was chaos and some god or another wrested something with the semblance of order from that primal chaos. But being the stuff that matter is made of, chaos couldn’t really be defeated, and she hid herself in the interstices. And hid herself well.

While theologians and philosophers banished chaos from their beautiful utopia of thought, chaos hid herself deep inside the order.

Natural philosophy, the olden name of physics, felt bold enough to state:

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 could be present before its eyes.

— Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

But is such an ‘intellect’ possible? A Deep Thought that can contain a billiard game the size of the universe in its mind. Standing on the shoulder of Newton the giant, Laplace thought so.

But numbers in the physical universe are different from the universe of mathematics. In mathematics, given a context, a number, say, 2 means 2 exactly. But in physics, the meaning of a number is much more contextual. The universe is 13.7 billion years old, cosmologists claim, give or take 200 million years, and so the zeros in 13,700,000,000 means that we don’t know what there is in those zeros. Every observable number in the universe has some uncertainty associated with it.

Laplace would have contended that this is simply due to human limitations. A pitifully finite human being can only enumerate a number up to a certain precision and thus he is doomed to significant ignorance. A more powerful being, the argument went, can surely be given enough capacity to store enough digits in its mind so that it can know what the real, exact age of the universe is.