| In commenting on irreversiblilty, Thomasina says |
Thomasina When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the
spoonful of jam spreads itself round, making red trails like the picture of a
meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come
together again.
(pgs 4-5) |
|
| Yet some experiments
appear to contradict this. (Thanks to Michael McBride for this wonderful demonstration.) |
| Later, Thomasina states the basic idea of Laplaces's Clockwork universe. |
Thomasina If you could stop every atom in its position and
direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended,
then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for
all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula
must exist just as if one could.
(pg 5) |
|
Chaos speaks denies the possibility of this through two observations:
- For
some systems, small differences in the starting values
can grow to substantially different eventual behaviors.
- ALL physical measurements involve errors, so we never are certain where we start.
|