The Laplace Demon: Knowing everything about the universe, knowing the past and the future, and finally being put to an end by quantum mechanics!

Jokes are circulating on the internet about the four great beasts of physics. They are Schrödinger's cat, Zeno's turtle, Maxwell's demon, and Laplace's demon. Schrödinger's cat I talked to you about a long time ago. The first two articles talked about the Zeno Turtle and the Maxwell Demon. Today's article on the Laplace Demon is the end of the four great beasts.

I have to say that these beasts exist for a reason. Schrodinger's cat and Zeno's turtle belong to illustrate certain ideas, while Maxwell's demon and Laplace's demon are conjectures based on certain theories. But the common denominator is that they are all false and are all about development. The fact that some of them were later proved wrong does not detract from the importance of their existence.

Well, as is customary, let's start with Laplace, the originator of the Laplace demon. Full name Pierre-Simon Laplace, the famous French astronomer and mathematician, a member of the French Academy of Sciences. The main founder of celestial mechanics and one of the founders of celestial evolutionary chemistry. He was also the founder of analytical probability theory and a pioneer of applied mathematics. In the course of his studies of celestial bodies, he created and developed many mathematical methods. The Laplace transformations, Laplace's theorem, and Laplace's equation, which bear his name, are widely used in various fields of science and technology.

In fact, in the beginning, Laplace's demon mimic was a wise man, not a demon. The original text of Laplace's hypothesis is: We can regard the present state of the universe as the result of its past and the cause of its future. If an intelligent man could know the forces of all-natural motions and the positions of all natural objects at a given moment, and if he could also analyze this data, the motion of the largest objects in the universe against the smallest particles would be contained in a simple formula. Nothing is ambiguous for the wise man; the future will only appear to him as the past. This passage is written in the introduction to his general overview theory.

The reason for this assumption is that Laplace was a determinist. Determinism is also known as Laplace's creed. It is the theory and doctrine that there are objective laws and causal relationships in nature and human society. Its essential element is that there is a cause and an effect. You may think that determinism is similar to causality, but there are some differences, and since that is not the focus of this article, I will not discuss them here.

As I said in my last article, the first reason these hypotheses are bandied about and proven is sound, well-founded reasoning, and the second is that the person making them has prestige. In those days the Laplace demon made sense. The Laplace demon was based on Newton's laws. At that time, Laplace applied Newton's laws to astrophysics, solving many problems and pioneering celestial mechanics. Newton's laws were also one of the few laws of the time that could explain everything in the world.

If the Laplace demon existed, it would know everything in the universe and, if exaggerated, would seem to be a god. If such an existence were confirmed, it would cause a sensation, no matter what the age. So people were still trying to confirm and find it, but as time went on, instead of getting good news, the Laplace demon was definitively determined to be impossible. When the laws of thermodynamics were proposed, quantum mechanics was established and the microscopic world was discovered, the Laplace demon was completely discredited.

In the era when the Laplace demon was proposed, Newton's laws led to the operation of everything and could be used in the macroscopic world. Who would have thought that the microscopic world is completely different from the macroscopic world? Newton's laws cannot explain the various microcosmic world principles. Even if it were true that a Laplacean demon could use Newton's laws to speculate on everything, then he would not be able to predict the future. As far as the entropy of the second law of thermodynamics is concerned, everything tends towards chaos and disorder. Uncertainty is the hallmark of the future.

The Laplace demon has been disproved, so what would the world be like if the Laplace demon were assumed to exist? This hypothesis is not difficult to imagine. Many people keep brainstorming based on their knowledge of their time, and many more go beyond the facts to brainstorm. So this hypothesis is not new.

According to the phrase "the future only appears to him as the past", it is as if a four-dimensional person could have his whole life unfolded before his eyes like a film. This is like the holographic theory of the universe. The universe we live in now is a high-dimensional projection, of which we are all a projection, so the past and the future are not our own.

Many of the assumptions of the old era have been confirmed or disproven, and those of the new era is constantly being updated. Human beings at all times are in constant pursuit of truth, constantly assuming those unknown possibilities and then constantly verifying or falsifying them. As long as we don't know the whole truth about the world, we won't stop.

Personally, I think it is a summary of the main points :

1. Laplace, full name Pierre-Simon Laplace, was a famous French astronomer and mathematician, and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. He was the main founder of celestial mechanics and one of the founders of celestial evolutionary chemistry. He was also the founder of analytical probability theory and a pioneer of applied mathematics. In the course of his studies of celestial bodies, he created and developed many mathematical methods. The Laplace transformations, Laplace's theorem, and Laplace's equation, which bear his name, are widely used in various fields of science and technology.

2. The Laplace demon is that we can see the present state of the universe as the fruit of its past and the cause of its future. If an intelligent man could know the forces of all-natural motions and the positions of all natural objects at a given moment, and if he could also analyze this data, the motion of the largest objects in the universe against the smallest particles would be contained in a simple equation. Nothing is ambiguous to the wise man; the future will only appear to him as the past.

3. The Plath demon is based on Newton's laws. When the laws of thermodynamics were formulated, quantum mechanics was established and the microscopic world was discovered, the Laplace demon was completely rejected.