Rutherford and Fry’s Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) by Hannah Fry & Adam Rutherford

Author:Hannah Fry & Adam Rutherford [Fry, Hannah & Rutherford, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473571501
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

The demon

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) is one of history’s greatest mathematicians. He’s often referred to as a French Isaac Newton, although the French probably refer to Newton as the English Laplace. Laplace was a man whose work had an enormous impact on engineering, astronomy and mathematics both during his own lifetime and over the centuries that followed. He was friends with the chemist, taxman and guillotinee Antoine Lavoisier (see Chapter 7), and together they produced influential work on the nature of heat. He turned his dizzying intellect to the motion of the planets, formulated equations that explained the tides, and at one point theorized a star with a mass so great that its gravity would not allow even light to escape its grasp. This idea was so advanced, so beyond anyone’s understanding at the time, that it played no part in the celestial science that would eventually describe exactly the same phenomenon – today we call them black holes. All the industrious thinking of his remarkable mind led Laplace to conclude that there was no place for chance in the universe.

In 1814, he imagined a super-intelligent omniscient being who knew the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe. If, as Laplace believed, there was no such thing as randomness, then the entire state of the universe would be predetermined by the recent past, and whatever lay ahead in the future would be the direct effect of how things presently stood. It was as though the world and everything that surrounded it was a gigantic mechanical clock of cause and effect – ticking forwards, tick-tock-tick-tock, each click of the cog according to the immutable mathematical laws of physics, with no space for error, nothing left to chance. The universe, he believed, ran on rails.

Laplace granted this omniscient being superpowers. It would be able to predict everything. It could calculate any eventuality according to the fundamental non-negotiable laws of physics. It could rewind the cosmos back to the Big Bang, or fast-forward to the heat-death of the universe. It would have a complete knowledge of absolutely everything – where every atom was at any point in time, every planet, every human. The moment of your birth, the date of your death. Chance would have no meaning. ‘Nothing would be uncertain,’ Laplace explained, ‘and the future, just like the past, would be present before its eyes.’

Laplace was not the first to concoct such grand universal mechanics. The classical scholars had also had a crack at it. Democritus – who conceived of the atom – thought chance to be a hiding place for those too idle to think. Cicero outlined Laplace’s idea almost 2,000 years before he was born, writing in 44 BCE:

… if there could be any mortal who could observe with his mind the interconnection of all causes, nothing indeed would escape him. For he who knows the causes of things that are to be necessarily knows all the things that are going to be […] For the things which

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