“Laplace Meets Gödel”

Jenann Ismael (Johns Hopkins University)

Abstract: There’s an understanding of what determinism entails illustrated by the familiar image that Laplace gave us of a demon that can predict everything that will happen in the universe from knowledge of initial conditions. I’ll argue that there are both specific and general reasons that there could never be a Laplacian demon in the world: not for classical mechanics, not for any theory.    I’ll draw some lessons for physics.