VIDEO CLIP (3-1) EDITOR/334 CAN MATH NOW PREDICT THE FUTURE
Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, were all mathematicians that studied sets, in particular infinite sets. They would tell you that there are limitations to set theory as a tool for describing natural processes. An important fundamental limitation is that we can never know how the processes actually work. We can only offer reasonable explanations that do not contradict what we see when we look closely. Another mathematician, Edward Lorenz would tell us that the present determines the future, but that the approximate present does not approximately determine the future. Lorenz gave us the butterfly effect, the idea that small changes in initial conditions can cause vast changes over time. Chaotic behavior is everywhere, it exists in many natural systems, including fluid flow, heartbeat irregularities, weather, and climate. Chaos is not that things are unpredictable, it is the fact that we, or rather our mathematics and logic can not predict them.
In other words, calculations to determine what will happen next in any complex system are expressed with differential equations. These are equations where the variables in the equation are changing, for instance, equations for predicting the weather. Large complex equations appear chaotic to us because our math is incomplete, or maybe we just can not come up with the correct math to get accurate calculations. So we can not predict the weather for more than a few days, or we may be able to predict that you will wake up tomorrow, but not for certainty. Probability is all we have, the systems of reality are deterministic, we can just not do calculations that produce anything other than probable predictions over short time scales. This is to say that - what will be - will be - , but we can not predict what will be when numbers get too big. Especially when we try to understand infinities, our math and logic fail, and since everything we try to measure closely tends to have an infinite nature, you must accept that all that is left for us when we try to understand reality is faith or probability
Therefore, don't make crazy stuff up, and be as reasonable as possible. Its bad enough that we can not see reality for what it really is. We must accept that we have vast limitations : I like to use the example, you can't teach a dog to do algebra, and we hairless apes have limitations too.
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