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Scientists Are Mapping the Boundaries of What Is Knowable and Unknowable
Math and computer science researchers have long known that some questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Now physicists are exploring how physical systems put hard limits on what we can predict.
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. 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. And last year, Cubitt, James Purcell, and Zhi Li further extended the setup to devise a material that, when subjected to a magnetic field that grows increasingly intense, will transition from one phase of matter to another at an unpredictable moment.
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