The French physicist Pierre Simone de Laplace (c. 1850) proposed a program in which, if he knew the position and motion of all the particles in the universe, he could predict the future exactly far into the future. This concept of classical determinism was thus based on an atomistic reductionism of the world as well as the assumption of total predictability.
After a long period of wrestling over this claim, scientists now reject such a view as an inaccurate and incomplete model of how particles behave. Prigogine (The End of Certainty) describes the history of this struggle and its recent resolution, which involves chaos theory, complexity, quantum mechanics, and non-equilibrium thermodynamics, all of which are shown to include non-deterministic and irreversible processes.
But even if Laplace's program were granted, there would still be a vast lack of knowledge. At the outset, he would know the position and momentum of a set of particles. At any future time, he would only know the position and momentum of a set of particles. Period. This 'knowledge' leaves out most of what we really know, which is on a much higher level of reality than the motions of atoms. Laplace's program was doomed at the start. (This critique was originally given by Michael Polanyi in Personal Knowledge).
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