Everything, as a complex equation

[narrator]

In science, we talk about how everything is a chain of reactions. A rock passes by our planet and has its trajectory altered by the reaction with our planet. One chemical reacts with another in our brain, resulting in a chain of events. One could literally begin at the BB and follow a long, perhaps infinite, chain of reactions which brings us to the point where I put the full-stop on the end of this sentence.

Is what happens in our thinking, acting and reacting, nothing more than part of the action/reaction chain of events, where even the choices we make are determined by mathematical principles of chemistry and physics, if we had the depth of knowledge to plot every tiny spark, every miniscule chemical and physical event, leading to the illusion of thought when every moment is really just a complex equation of events?

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

You are not the first to think of this.

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 would be present before its eyes.

Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, 3rd edition. Paris: Courcier Imprimeur, 1816

Quantum mechanics calls into question the ability to know at a certain moment "all the forces that set nature in motion, and all the positions of all items of which nature is composed."

 

[narrator]

Quantum mechanics calls into question the ability to know at a certain moment "all the forces that set nature in motion, and all the positions of all items of which nature is composed."

Great quote.. thanks. How does QM phrase that question?

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Great quote.. thanks. How does QM phrase that question?

Thanks. From now on it's the Jimmy Uncertainty Principle.

In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states a fundamental limit on the accuracy with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously known.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle"

Force is a function of momentum.

 

[narrator]

Thanks. From now on it's the Jimmy Uncertainty Principle.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle"

Force is a function of momentum.

lol. Thanks Jimmy, so that means wiki is prone to the JUP also?