In 1814, the mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace declared Newton’s laws would enable us, should we know the position and velocity of every particle in the universe, to predict anything, forever. Over a century later, computers made it seem as though we could put Laplace’s prediction to the test.4 The butterfly effect suggests otherwise. Even when we can identify deterministic rules, we cannot make perfect predictions. In the face of chaos, we should expect to be surprised. We may know the rules governing a chaotic system’s behavior, but we cannot know its precise initial conditions. When we
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