Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

triton100 t1_itx1dxg wrote

It’s only relatively recently that humanity has discovered universal laws. I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t more to come.

Didn’t scientists recently discovered that some sub atomic particles displayed random movement behaviour that could suggest a diversion away from deterministic behaviour?

1

ebolathrowawayy t1_iu0mbzc wrote

> It’s only relatively recently that humanity has discovered universal laws. I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t more to come.

Universal laws akin to if A then B? Yes. There is almost no chance for causality to break, like you're more likely to get struck by lightning 10,000 times within 5 seconds than for there to be a discovery that contradicts causality, it's not even worth discussing because if causality breaks down then nothing makes sense anymore, not even logic.

> Didn’t scientists recently discovered that some sub atomic particles displayed random movement behaviour that could suggest a diversion away from deterministic behaviour?

Yes (I don't think it was recent, unless you mean since the discovery of quantum physics). https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-quantum-mechanics-rule-out-free-will/

Even if every particle was completely random that doesn't mean the universe isn't deterministic though. In computer science, random number generators will always produce a deterministic output, but the distribution of numbers it spits out is "random". There has never been a discovery of true randomness. Particle decay is useful for creating a random distribution of numbers and it's used as a random number generator for some applications, but the decaying radioactive substance was always going to decay in precisely a certain way and the detector was always going to detect isotopes exactly where they land on the detector and always at the same time and always leading to the same numbers generated. No matter how many times you rewind time the outcome is the same. Nothing is truly random in the universe.

2