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'Next-Level' Chaos Traces the True Limit of Predictability
In math and computer science, researchers have long understood that some questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Now physicists are exploring how even ordinary physical systems put hard limits on what we can predict, even in principle.
The French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace crisply articulated his expectation that the universe was fully knowable in 1814, asserting that a sufficiently clever “demon” could predict the entire future given a complete knowledge of the present. “I give you God’s view,” said Toby Cubitt, a physicist turned computer scientist at University College London and part of the vanguard of the current charge into the unknowable, and “you still can’t predict what it’s going to do.” If it takes some oomph to do this, a system is “gapped.” If it can become excited at any moment, without any infusion of energy, it is “gapless.” The spectral gap determines the color that shines from a neon sign, what a material will do when you remove all heat from it, and — in a different context — what the mass of the proton should be.
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