Load-Bearing Walls
Mar 10, 2026 2:31 pm
New Post from BiteofanApple
Load-Bearing Walls
March 10, 2026
We like to believe that we can predict the future. We believe it because it's true, at least in part. Physical systems obey known physical laws and so even fairly complex systems can be understood and predicted with stunning accuracy. Every branch of science makes predictions. Planes fly, servers compute, and dams generate power all through the strength we have to predict the future, if only in the short term. In our human world, we see pollsters predict elections with better-than-random odds, doctors performing research and intervention at global scales, and even disease propagating at predictable rates.
It's stunning just how good we are at this in the modern world. We're so good at predicting the future that much of the financial world relies on it as a hedge against the unforeseen. Short term catastrophe is easier to bear when you can predict that good times can and will return.
Yet there is, of course, much we cannot predict and two main reasons why.
The Chaos Limit
Even the simplest systems can become unpredictable with time because, while the past may indeed predict the future, the approximate past does not. This is chaos. Measurements with real instruments in the real world are always imprecise and so lead to unremovable error. These errors stack up over time and eventually reduce the usefulness of our models.
Famously, the double pendulum illustrates this phenomenon well. A simple pendulum is completely understood, yet a double pendulum is a chaotic system where even with knowledge of its starting position to ten decimal places, the best models will fail in the end.
Still, while chaos may ultimately limit our ability to predict the future in the long term, it leaves quite a lot of wiggle room.1 No, there's another, much deeper, issue we need to understand.
