Math Shows Some Black Holes Erase Your Past and Give You Unlimited Futures (vice.com)

dmoberhaus writes: An international team of mathematicians has found that there are theoretical black holes that would allow an observer to survive passage through the event horizon. This would result in the breakdown of determinism, a fundamental feature of the universe that allows physics to have predictive power, and result in the destruction of the observer's past and present them with an infinite number of futures. The findings were detailed in a report published last week in Physical Review Letters.

Comments

Re:determinism, a fundamental feature of the unive

[BitZtream]

While we may wish for determinism, it has been shown long before that it does not exist.

Wrong. Close your eyes. Did the cosmos cease to exist while your eyes were closed because you were unable to observe it?

Please stop reading half a philosophy text book thats 20 years above your education level and pretending you suddenly understand physics of the cosmos.

Philosophy != Physics I don't care what your self absorbed Philosophy prof told you.

Being unable to predict the future does not make it indeterminate, it just means you don't have a complete state for the system or enough processing power to process that state faster than happens naturally. In order to truely use determinism to predict the future, we'd have to be outside observers, have full knowledge of the state of the universe at a point in time AND most importantly, some way to simulate the properties of the universe faster than real time (which actually could be done given enough 'stuff' to be the processor, unfortunately using any known method that would require a few orders of magnitude MORE stuff than exists in the cosmos presently.

That means we're not likely to be predicting the future, but it doesn't mean its not predictable on a cosmic scale or that you couldn't 'calculate the universe' given enough time. Both of those things would just be utterly silly for us humans to try based on our current understanding of the cosmos.