Let’s return now to the notion that we can predict the position of the moon, and thus the status of the tides, at any time in the future. Surely this means you’ll be able to predict whether you could go crabbing at noon on your thousandth birthday, right? In theory, the answer is yes. In practice, though, it turns out to be a little bit tricky.
Imagine that you buy a fancy laser rangefinder to measure the moon’s position and speed right this very second. Unfortunately, no matter how good your rangefinder is, your measurements will almost certainly have some small error. As a consequence of the initial measurement being a little off, the position you predict a year later will also be off. The magnitude of the error will be a bit larger than that of your initial measurement. Two years down the road, the error will be larger still, and a thousand years down the road you could be way off the mark.
In order to make your future predictions perfectly accurate, you would need to improve your rangefinder such that the error in your measurement shrinks to zero. While this sounds like a lot of work, there is nothing in classical physics that would prevent it. In classical physics, measurements can be made with what we would call infinite precision, or zero uncertainty, provided you are willing to work hard enough. Predictions for the future can therefore be made as accurate as you want.
Just as the concept of determinism becomes a little hazy in the quantum realm, so does the concept of certainty. The tenet of uncertainty is central to our understanding and interpretation of quantum physics.
SIR ISAAC NEWTON
Sir Isaac Newton was born in 1642. A premature baby, his mother was known for joking that he could have fit inside of a quart bottle. Fortunately for all of us, he survived his first difficult days, and then got straight to work on a series of remarkable scientific breakthroughs.
Newton finished college in his early twenties and in the two years following his graduation, he founded three independent branches of math and science. While staying in the English countryside to escape an outbreak of the Bubonic Plague, he managed to invent the underlying principles of calculus, lay the foundations for geometric optics, and deduce the concept of universal gravitation.
The world would have to wait for these breakthroughs, however, since he chose not to publish them right away. He feared that so doing might attract the attention of others, a most unwelcome prospect given his excessively introverted nature. In 1684, however, his colleague Edmund Halley (yes, the one with the comet) offered to sponsor by Newton. Halley was hoping for a bestseller since his previous investment—The History of Fishes—was a flop.
The product, Newton’s Principia, is without question one of the most important scientific publications of all time. Among other things, it ultimately led to him becoming the first scientist ever to be knighted.
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