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I am having fun dabbling in the philosophy of physics, digging into what might be claimed by the laws we have put forth. At a philosophical level, one of the important aspects of freewill is alternate possibilities: one must be able to choose between distinct possibilities in order to have freewill.

This lead me to an interesting construction: Norton's Dome, cf. e.g. this related Phys.SE question. This is a particular construction which permits multiple alternate possibilities for the same initial state (the state where an object is at the top of the dome). It could stay up there forever, or at any point may slide in any direction. It is a fascinating shape that definitely points towards some of the philosophical topics I am gawking at.

It is mentioned that this dome violates the principle of Lipschitz continuity. This is not portrayed as a nail in the coffin for this shape, but does suggest that this isn't a garden variety shape that we find every day.

It strikes me that the inverse square central forces we deal with in classical physics cannot create the sort of 2nd derivative discontinuity that Norton's Dome exhibits. Indeed, I believe they can only produce differential equations that satisfy Lipschitz continuity. This suggests that all physics defined by such forces must lead to exactly one unique solution for each initial state (not talking perturbations here).

I am less sure of such things as one delves deep into the world of quantum mechanics. Are there known physical systems that can exhibit true non-determinism (being able to evolve on two or more distinct paths)? For such a question, I assume a mathematical level of perfection in the construction of the initial state, but that all elements of that initial state must be elements we have seen in modern theories (atoms, electrons, quarks, quantum fields, etc.), as opposed to simple mathematical constraints (Norton's Dome is really phrased with the surface as a mathematical constraint, not something physical)

Related Question: Non-deterministic particle system - This is similar but restricts itself to only classical point-particle interactions. It also did not receive a satisfactory answer.

Qmechanic
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Cort Ammon
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For sure you can have non-deterministic mathematical models of nature. Norton's Dome, spontaneous symmetry breaking, Copenhagen's interpretation of quantum mechanics or spacetime singularities are examples of such, as pointed out in this post. You may test any of such models on real physical systems and find no contradiction between predictions and actual behaviour of nature. That does not prove however that nature is non-deterministic, even though you have a fitting non-deterministic model of it, since there could in principle be a new superior model which is both deterministic and compatible with tested predictions of the older model.

As an example to ilustrate the idea, general theory of relativity (GR) states that any object can fall into a Schwarzschild black hole singularity in finite proper time and the future (if there is even one) of such object after having reached the singularity is absolutely undetermined. It is generally believed however, that at some point GR breaks down and a theory of quantum gravity should come into play, speculatively giving a fully deterministic trajectory for the infalling object (as well as for spacetime itself).

Taking quantum mechanics as another example, if you are to believe that time evolution is unitary for all systems of the universe, then you are forced to drop the wave-function collapse postulate (since it clearly results in non-unitary evolution). In that case, there should exist some Hamiltonian of the universe which for any Hilbert space states (or density matrix states) gives unitary (and hence deterministic) evolution. Bohr probabilities are simply a consequence of the deterministic entanglement between subsystems (see Everett's interpretation for example).

So in conclusion, I would assert you cannot prove any physical system of nature inherently exhibits non-determinism nor that it does not. Rather you believe nature is always deterministic, if you will, because that is the point of science and physics in the end.

Mateo
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In Newtonian mechanics for $N$ particles, so long as you avoid "pathological" situations like the Norton's Dome example, or otherwise introduce non-determinism through a non-deterministic force like in the Langevin equation, the time evolution of the system is fully determined once you know the positions and momenta of all of the particles at one instant in time.

The same is generally true for fluid mechanics like in the Navier-Stokes equations, or relativistic field theories like electromagnetism or general relativity (GR). You can have scenarios in GR and possibly in the Navier-Stokes equations when singularities form which make the equations well defined. At least in GR, this isn't a big problem in practice; in numerical approaches to GR evolving colliding binary systems, for example, one can use a so-called "puncture method" where the singularity is dealt with analytically, and matched onto a numerical solution. However, in both GR and Navier-Stokes, generally the appearance of a singularity would indicate that these equations are being pushed beyond their regime of validity, and to understand what's happening at the singularity requires a more complete theory. Perhaps, in this more complete theory, there is a way to time evolve the system deterministically.

So, at least within classical (non-quantum) physics, assuming you perfectly know the initial state and don't introduce any pathologies, generally the equations are deterministic, modulo some edge cases that at least don't cause issues in practice when we need to do calculations to compare to experiment.

Here I will discuss two sources in which non-determinism (or at least, "non-determinism for all practical purposes") can enter into physics...

  • Quantum mechanics. The outcome of any experiment involving a state that is a superposition over different basis states in the observable you want to measure cannot be predicted in advance. However, there is a kind of "generalized determinism" that quantum mechanics satisfies, in that if you know the initial state perfectly, you can at least predict the probabilities for any future observation.
  • Uncertainty in the initial state. In my opinion, the most relevant source of "non-determinism" in the laws of physics that leads to complexity and interesting behavior in the world around us that we can't predict easily, comes from uncertainty in specifying initial conditions. You can try to wave this away as "mathematically trivial," but it does seem to be an important feature of reality as experienced by human beings. Even in a purely classical model, there are simply too many degrees of freedom to specify all their states or store them in a computer. And for a given particle, there is always some measurement error in specifying its position and momentum. Because many real-world systems tend to be chaotic, any small uncertainty in the initial conditions can quickly balloon into an inability to make predictions. Michael Berry estimated that, even with a supercomputer, it was impossible to predict the state of motion of a billiard ball after several collisions, because its motion becomes sensitive to increasingly minute details of the initial state. Here I quote from an article on anecdote.com, which includes a quote from Taleb's The Black Swan when talking about Berry's paper:

The problem is that to correctly computer the ninth impact, you need to take account the gravitational pull of someone standing next to the table (modestly, Berry’s computations use a weight of less than 150 pounds). And to compute the fifty-sixth impact, every single elementary particle in the universe needs to be present in your assumptions! An electron at the edge of the universe, separated from us by 10 billion light-years, must figure in the calculations, since it exerts a meaningful effect on the outcome.

I realize you're willing to assume that the initial state can be perfectly specified, so you can consider this answer as a frame challenge that this assumption is actually incredibly strong in practice and hides much of the interesting complexity of the real world. In some sense, it is not a "stable" assumption, since adding a small amount of uncertainty in the initial state tends to explode into much larger amounts of uncertainty in realistic systems, rather than staying "close" to the idealized solution you would have found with perfect initial conditions.

Andrew
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Well no, quantum mechanics is of course not deterministic. Is there a notion of causality in physical laws?. The wave function evolves deterministically. But (Copenhagen) it collapses randomly to a new state which then evolves deterministically.

If you are asking about the physics of free will, you are asking about the physics of the mind. We cannot even say what the mind (sensation, emotion, awareness, ...) is, and only loosely how it behaves. So incorporating it into physics sounds problematic.

But it obviously arises from the brain. Someday we may be able to map states of the brain to states of the mind (or some model of the mind) without knowing what the mind is. The brain evolves according to the laws of quantum mechanics. So we might hope for an effective theory of the mind. There is room to argue for free will. But until we know more, this is philosophy, not physics.

Even though the basis for a theory of the mind will someday be physics, I don't expect a theory of the mind to arise directly from physics any more than other properties of organisms do. Psychology comes from biology, which comes from chemistry, which comes from physics.

mmesser314
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Would not a Mach-Zehnder interferometer demonstration of the two-slit effect qualify?There are two possible outcomes when a photon hits the first beamsplitter, and no way to know in advance whether it will pass through (evolve along one path) or be reflected (evolve along another path).

niels nielsen
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QM shows that physical systems fundamentally evolve in a nondeterministic way. Although the quantum wave evolves deterministically, this is just a euphimism since its merely saying the probabilities of a certain outcome evolve deterministically. It's far from how deterministic is understood classically in Newtonian physics.

Mozibur Ullah
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In the context of turbulence, this is very relevant. From simple scaling arguments à la Kolmogorov, you find that the velocity fields of fully turbulent flow to be very rough, at least in the inertial range. Quantitatively, the expected Hölder exponent would be $1/3$, which is less than $1$ needed for Lipschitz continuity. A simple toy model illustrating this would be a 1D velocity field following a Weierstrass function (the fractal, not the elliptic function). A Lagrangian tracer's equations of motion would therefore not be Lipschitz continuous.

For example a hot topic in this field is spontaneous stochasticity. The idea is that to such irregular equations of motion, you can add noise. Your system is not deterministic anymore but rather stochastic, so by construction you do not have a unique time evolution. However, by sending the noise to zero, you do not recover determinism but rather converge towards well defined statistics. This is related to the butterfly effect where your equations are still deterministic, but the flow of the equations of motion is discontinuous with respect to the initial conditions. This kind of behaviour can be proven rigorously for simple models, and could be applicable to more realistic fluids.

LPZ
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I am having fun dabbling in the philosophy of physics, digging into what might be claimed by the laws we have put forth. At a philosophical level, one of the important aspects of freewill is alternate possibilities: one must be able to choose between distinct possibilities in order to have freewill.

This equates determinism and free will, but actually these are not the same. The world might well be deterministic, but still appear to us as non-deterministic for all the practical purposes, due to our inherent inability to predict the future (due to the large or infinite number of degrees of freedom involved). As, IMHO, anything going beyond for all the practical purposes is not physics (or science in general), this means that there is free will.

Chaotic systems (hyper-sensitive to the initial conditions), thermodynamic systems (with effectively infinite number of degrees of freedom), and the measurement-related issues in quantum mechanics are the immediate examples of the limits of prediction.

See thread Scientific determinism and the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in this community, as well as many related threads in Philosophy community:
What is the rigorous definition of free will?
Wouldn't physicalistic determinism and non-compatiblistic free will both be possible at the same time?
Determinism vs prediction

Roger V.
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