But a discovery at the end of the twentieth century even questions Laplace’s basic tenet of the theoretical predictability of the future. In the early 1990s a PhD student by the name of Zhihong Xia proved that there is a way to configure five planets such that when you let them go, the combined gravitational pull causes one of the planets to fly off and reach an infinite speed in a finite amount of time. No planets collide, but still the equations have built into them this catastrophic outcome for the residents of the unlucky planet. The equations are unable to make any prediction of what
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