The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

by Sean Carroll

In modern parlance, Laplace was pointing out that the universe is something like a computer. You enter an input (the state of the universe right now), it does a calculation (the laws of physics) and gives you an output (the state of the universe one moment later). Similar ideas had previously been suggested by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Roger Boscovich, and were prefigured over two millennia earlier by Ajivika, a heterodox school of ancient Indian philosophy. Since computers hadn’t been invented yet, Laplace imagined a “vast intellect” that knew the positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe, and understood all the forces they were subject to, and had sufficient computational power to apply Newton’s laws of motion. In that case, as he put it, “for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain, and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.” His contemporaries immediately judged “vast intellect” to be too boring, and renamed it Laplace’s Demon.

the future