Ep 176: David Deutsch’s ”The Fabric of Reality” Chapter 9 ”Quantum Computers” Part 2
ToKCast
The Butterfly Effect Is a Classical Phenomenon
The butterfly effect itself is a classical phenomena. chaos theory is about limitations on predictability in classical physics stemming from the fact that almost all classical systems are inherently unstable. The instability has nothing to do with any tendency to behave violently or disintegrate it is about an extreme sensitivity to initial conditions suppose we know the present state of some physical system such as a set of billiard balls rolling on a table if the system obeyed classical physics as it does to a good approximation we should then be able to determine its future behavior say whether a particular ball will go into a pocket or not just as we can predict an eclipse or a planetary conjunction but in practice we're never able to measure the initial positions and
