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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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Did something change? Last time I checked we didn't know whether in the grand scale the universe is or isn't deterministic.
That we know that the universe isn't (seemingly) deterministic locally doesn't change anything about that.
I'm pretty sure it is essentially that any propensity the macro-scale universe has for the appearance of determinism is an illusion since the fundamental scales of the universe and everything it is built on are probabilistic. Nothing built on probabilistic foundations can be deterministic. It can appear to be. In large enough samples the law of large numbers smooths all the chaos out, but that is all our world is. Mathematically smoothed chaos. We as a species have known that for a very long time, but it has only begun to permeate the social zeitgeist in recent years and there is still a lot of pushback from certain sections of society.
The best theories are non-deterministic, but of course we don't know if they are the last word about reality. To put it another way, we don't know why the math is non-deterministic in our best equations.
The old equations were deterministic, but they turned out to be wrong. Something similar may happen here.