this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2024
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A paper, by philosopher of physics John Norton, describes a scenario in which a ball is placed at the apex of a perfectly smooth and frictionless dome. The paper argues that, according to Newton's laws, the ball will spontaneously start rolling down the dome at some random time, without any external force acting on it. Norton's claim suggests that Newtonian mechanics may not a deterministic theory or that there are multiple possible interpretations.

https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/DomePSA2006.pdf

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's nothing so obvious given that plenty of people tried to point out holes in the logic. The issue is with the notion of causality and there being multiple possible future states that are all equally valid.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

My point is, the zero point has to be so small it becomes subject to the uncertainty principle, which is not a Newtonian law. So while the maths might resolve to the unexpected excitation event it doesn't make sense in reality because we don't apply Newton's laws at the tiny point sizes needed here?

When you plug crazy small numbers into Newton's laws don't the answers stop making sense, so you have to use Einstein rather than Newton's physics?

So frequently, philosophy forces us to think about wonderful ideas that lead us to amazing realisations, but so often those same ideas breakdown when applied to reality. This is where physics steps in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago

Thing is that we don't have a complete model of physics either. Whether universe is deterministic or not is still an open question, we don't know if quantum effects are a result of hidden variables or genuine randomness.