Transcriber: Robert Deliman Reviewer: Denise RQ
Host: Next we welcome to the stage
Mr. Ritvik Prabhu.
He is a junior at Radnor High School.
Ritvik will be exploring the relationship between philosophy and science
through history and his own findings,
and the possibility of a world where we know everything.
Here is Ritvik Prabhu, with Predictable Movements,
a study of philosophy and science.
(Applause)
Ritvik Prabhu: Looking at these three questions,
they might not seem like they have much of a connection really,
but they do,
and they all started when I began to think about predictability.
These three questions are:
what if we had all the available data in the world?
Could we predict every outcome at that moment?
Would philosophy still exist if we had all of this data?
It all began in my viewpoints class.
Viewpoints is an integrated class, social studies, and language arts,
we were doing the transcendentalism unit
and we had to take our basic observations of our natural world
and combine them into a larger idea.
I decided to do my essay about predictability.
I called it Predictable Motions.
The basic idea was
I saw in nature that there are a lot of patterns,
and these patterns had a way of causing certain outcomes
so I said, "Are there certain variables which cause these outcomes
and, if we found all of them, could we then predict every outcome?
I created an analogy:
the snake and the mouse.
So, you have a snake, and you know that it gets hungry;
and you know that it eats mice.
So if you put a mouse in a cage with a snake,
after a certain amount of time,
the snake is going to eat the mouse.
That's a really simplistic version of what I was trying to show,
but it holds to be true.
I was talking to my friends after I had handed in the essay,
we talked, and they didn't really agree with me.
They didn't believe that you can predict everything.
As we discussed, I don't know how it came up,
but suddenly, I was asked,
Do you believe that philosophy would still exist
if we knew everything?
I didn't know how to answer that,
so I decided to just stick with with what I believed philosophy was.
My belief was that philosophy was explaining the unexplainable
until science could come around to explaining it.
I created a graph in my head that looks something like this.
The basic idea was that blue is science, and red is philosophy.
Right in between where they meet is the frontier of knowledge.
So, anything that's beyond, in the red zone, we don't fully know yet,
but we've created philosophies and thoughts to explain it.
I thought I was right, I didn't agree with them,
and I went home, sat down at the computer,
did some research, and found I was wrong.
And I was pretty wrong.
There are two reasons why I was wrong.
The first was I found we can't actually predict every outcome.
The reason for that is based in physics and math.
A man, a physicist named Gödel, created three incompleteness theorems.
The first one stated that in any system
where you can do math of any kind,
there are certain variables in that that you can't explain.
And because you can't explain them,
then you technically can't use them to predict other outcomes.
The basic idea of that is I have a hand,
and each finger on the hand is what we know.
But in between each finger is what we don't know.
The sad thing about that is we don't know what we don't know,
so we can never truly figure that out.
To explain this, and to come to a consensus,
the global scientific community met and decided
that they would create the Copenhagen Interpretation.
The Copenhagen Interpretation uses Gödel's first incompleteness theorem,
and a couple of other theorems,
and it basically says we don't know what we don't know, and we can't predict it,
because there's a certain degree of randomness.
A way to explain that is concentric circles.
Red is what we know right now, and it's hardcore that we know it.
Blue is what we don't know,
but we could technically find out if we find the variables.
But then there's this green field
around everything that we do and don't know,
and that is what we can never find out because it's the degree of randomness.
Of course, scientists are going to disagree.
There are three scientists
who didn't fully agree
with the quantum theory created by the Copenhagen Interpretation
and these three scientists were Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen.
Their idea wasn't targeting the fact that the quantum theory was incorrect,
they just believed that it was incomplete.
They did agree with what the Copenhagen Interpretation had created,
they just didn't think it was enough.
They use a lot of scientific jargon I don't understand,
but that's basically the main idea.
However, Einstein took it a little bit further.
He used the EPR argument to try to prove
that quantum theory is incomplete
because of these things called hidden variables.
Hidden variables are basically just variables we don't know.
To explain that, once again, red is what we do know;
but then, all around, instead of a blue field,
it's just one green field of what we don't know but we can find out.
So Einstein was a determinist
which means that he believed God does not roll the dice.
He thought that at the end point of human existence,
we technically could figure out every single variable
and predict every outcome.
It was pretty neat agreeing with Einstein.
The only downside was
that I went against the full, global scientific community.
So to answer that question, "Could we predict every outcome?"
No, we cannot; as of now.
Recently, a funny thing - the EPR theorem might be incorrect
because one of the main foundations of that theorem
was of electron entanglement
which means electrons can't affect other electrons far away.
But scientists have recently observed that that actually does occur.
So right now, it's up in the air
whether or not they were actually correct.
So my second mistake was believing
science and philosophy are fundamentally different,
because the truth is science is philosophy.
Philosophy started at first, and then science branched off of it,
but they both come from the same roots.
Philosophy is the idea of thinking.
A famous philosopher said, "I think, therefore I am."
Science started from the idea of natural philosophy
which is the idea you can look into nature,
and that's where you get your ideas.
The first major natural philosopher was Aristotle.
He didn't really use observation.
He used his own ideas
and what he had heard from other philosophers,
but he did look into nature for those ideas.
Then along came a man named Francis Bacon;
he was almost the creator of the empirical method and of science
because he said that "I will never accept any truth unless I observe it myself."
That was incredibly important for the scientific community
because that meant that now,
you couldn't just take the word of someone from before;
you had to prove it yourself.
He was joined by another man, Ren‎é Descartes.
They had different ideologies, but they both were based on observation.
So this is my new graph. I'm pretty proud of it.
It starts with philosophy right there,
which is blue, and that's science.
You'll notice that the X-axis is time on the graph,
and if you notice, philosophy is the only thing at the beginning
of when we started truly thinking.
As time went on, right here, where they diverge,
that is when Francis Bacon first created the idea of observation.
Observation is a really important thing in science;
it's actually on the Webster definition of science,
it's a pretty key thing.
So as they diverge,
they didn't just completely separate and never met again.
They do often intersect at several points.
They intersect depending on how abstract they are.
So that's the Y-axis.
The Z-axis, the amount of knowledge,
you don't really need to pay a whole lot of attention to,
but that's just the idea;
that we're constantly learning things, and philosophy is constantly growing.
But where they intersect
if the red overcomes the blue?
That means that something we thought was true in our heads
we were actually able to prove.
An example of that is the electron entanglement.
Then, where the blue intersects the red
means that something that we thought we knew,
through observation or through science,
was actually proven wrong through an abstract method.
Many people think that physics and math are sciences,
but they really aren't because they're based in just our minds.
You don't really need to observe something to prove it's true.
An example of that is the EPR theorem.
"Would philosophy still exist?"
Yes, because science is philosophy, philosophy is thinking.
During the transcendentalism unit,
we learned about a thinker named Ralph Waldo Emerson;
and there is quote that he said that really struck me,
"Tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again,
though it contradict every thing you said today."
I think this is really important.
It doesn't really have a lot to do
with philosophy, and science, or with predictability,
but is that idea it doesn't matter if you're wrong
because, as long as you keep thinking,
it doesn't matter you're wrong today
if you can accept what the truth is tomorrow.
Science, as you've seen, moves so fast;
philosophers constantly have different ideas,
but they keep thinking,
and that's what I want you all to take away from today.
Thank you.
(Applause)