Who said this quote?

December 4, 2007 4:33 PM

Who said "Given the velocity and position of all atoms I can predict the future." (or something very similar to that)?
posted by sepsis to Science & Nature (12 answers total)

Best answer: Are you thinking of Marquis de LaPlace:

"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."
posted by justkevin at 4:38 PM on December 4, 2007 [3 favorites]

Not sure if this helps, but might you be thinking of Archimedes?

"Give me a place to stand on, and I can move the earth."
posted by war wrath of wraith at 4:38 PM on December 4, 2007

This idea, generally speaking, is called determinism. De La Place was not articulating a new idea, but interpreting it eloquently in terms of new physical understanding provided his contemporaries and forebearers (Newton, for one). The idea was widespread and debated after Newtonian physics came to prominence. Poincare spoke of what we now think of as chaos theory (systems may be deterministic, but tiny changes in initial conditions can have extremely complicated effects on the results). See butterfly effect.

These days, quantum mechanics, particularly the uncertainty principle, show this notion to be practically unworkable, if not completely impossible.
posted by phrontist at 4:54 PM on December 4, 2007

Of course, Heisenberg proved LaPlace wrong on this point.
posted by squidlarkin at 4:55 PM on December 4, 2007 [1 favorite]

Are you looking for a real person? I know a character in Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, Thomasina, says something very similar to this.
posted by Stacey at 4:57 PM on December 4, 2007

Heisenberg didn't quite do that. There are non-local deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics.
posted by edd at 5:00 PM on December 4, 2007

Response by poster: justkevin answered my question. I know all about the concept, I just wanted the quote...turned out the actual quote was a lot wordier than I thought it was. Oh well. Thanks for the help!
posted by sepsis at 5:02 PM on December 4, 2007

Irrespective of Heisenberg, it might not be possible anyway. See "N-body problem".
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 5:49 PM on December 4, 2007

Someone beat me to Heisenberg.....carry on.
posted by doppleradar at 5:53 PM on December 4, 2007

The quote seems to be often summarized the way you put it.
posted by PercussivePaul at 6:16 PM on December 4, 2007

Actually, Heisenberg didn't disprove the statement, he just showed that it wasn't possible to get both pieces of knowledge required.
posted by flaterik at 10:37 PM on December 4, 2007

This made me think of Dr. Manhattan.
posted by kpmcguire at 9:29 AM on December 5, 2007