Laplace's demon


In the history of science, Laplace's demon was the first published articulation of causal or scientific determinism, by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814. According to determinism, if someone knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe, their past and future values for any given time are entailed; they can be calculated from the laws of classical mechanics.
A desire to confirm or refute Laplace's demon played a vital motivating role in the subsequent development of statistical thermodynamics, the first of several repudiations developed by later generations of physicists to the assumption of causal determinacy upon which Laplace's demon is erected.

English translation

This intellect is often referred to as Laplace's demon. Laplace himself did not use the word "demon", which was a later embellishment. As translated into English above, he simply referred to: "Une intelligence ... Rien ne serait incertain pour elle, et l'avenir, comme le passé, serait présent à ses yeux." Apparently, Laplace was not the first to evoke one such demon and strikingly similar passages can be found decades before Laplace's Essai philosophique in the work of scholars such as Nicolas de Condorcet and Baron D'Holbach. However, it seems that the first who offered the image of a super-powerful calculating intelligence was Roger Joseph Boscovich, whose formulation of the principle of determinism in his 1758 Theoria philosophiae naturalis turns out not only to be temporally prior to Laplace's but also—being founded on fewer metaphysical principles and more rooted in and elaborated by physical assumptions—to be more precise, complete, and comprehensive than Laplace's somewhat parenthetical statement of the doctrine.

Arguments against Laplace's demon

Thermodynamic irreversibility

According to chemical engineer Robert Ulanowicz, in his 1986 book Growth and Development, Laplace's demon met its end with early 19th century developments of the concepts of irreversibility, entropy, and the second law of thermodynamics. In other words, Laplace's demon was based on the premise of reversibility and classical mechanics; however, Ulanowicz points out that many thermodynamic processes are irreversible, so that if thermodynamic quantities are taken to be purely physical then no such demon is possible as one could not reconstruct past positions and momenta from the current state. Maximum entropy thermodynamics takes a very different view, considering thermodynamic variables to have a statistical basis which can be kept separate from the microscopic physics. However, this theory has met criticism regarding its ability to make predictions about physics; a number of physicists and mathematicians, including Yvan Velenik of the Department of Mathematics for the University of Geneva, have pointed out that maximum entropy thermodynamics essentially describes our knowledge about a system and not the system itself.

Quantum mechanical irreversibility

Due to its canonical assumption of determinism, Laplace's demon is incompatible with the Copenhagen interpretation, which stipulates indeterminacy. The interpretation of quantum mechanics is still very much open for debate and there are many who take opposing views.

Chaos theory

is sometimes pointed out as a contradiction to Laplace's demon: it describes how a deterministic system can nonetheless exhibit behavior that is impossible to predict: as in the butterfly effect, minor variations between the starting conditions of two systems can result in major differences. While this explains unpredictability in practical cases, applying it to Laplace's case is questionable: under the strict demon hypothesis all details are known—to infinite precision—and therefore variations in starting conditions are non-existent. Put another way: Chaos theory is applicable when knowledge of the system is imperfect whereas Laplace's demon assumes perfect knowledge of the system, therefore chaos theory and Laplace's demon are actually compatible with each other.

Cantor diagonalization

In 2008, David Wolpert used Cantor diagonalization to disprove Laplace's demon. He did this by assuming that the demon is a computational device and showed that no two such devices can completely predict each other. Wolpert's paper was cited in 2014 in a paper of Josef Rukavicka, where a significantly simpler argument is presented that disproves Laplace's demon using Turing machines, under the assumption of free will.

Recent views

There has recently been proposed a limit on the computational power of the universe, i.e. the ability of Laplace's demon to process an infinite amount of information. The limit is based on the maximum entropy of the universe, the speed of light, and the minimum amount of time taken to move information across the Planck length, and the figure was shown to be about 10120 bits. Accordingly, anything that requires more than this amount of data cannot be computed in the amount of time that has elapsed so far in the universe.
Another theory suggests that if Laplace's demon were to occupy a parallel universe or alternate dimension from which it could determine the implied data and do the necessary calculations on an alternate and greater time line, the aforementioned time limitation would not apply. This position is for instance explained in The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch, who says that realizing a 300-qubit quantum computer would prove the existence of parallel universes carrying the computation.

Depictions in popular culture