Get the latest tech news

What situations in classical physics are non-deterministic?

In Sean Carroll's book "The Big Picture," he states (chapter 4, page 35): Classical mechanics, the system of equations studied by Newton and Laplace, isn't perfectly deterministic. There are

As this system is time-symmetric, it is also possible to consider the case of a particle which originally does not exist and comes from infinity, or even doing both (restriction of the force to specific time intervals will do to insure those outcomes). The most famous example of which is a 5-body gravitational problem where one of the particle will also go to infinity in finite time, by simply borrowing energy from two 2-body systems. For a general treatment on the issue of determinism in classical physics, you can also check this article of Earman, for instance.

Get the Android app