What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge. Marcus Sautoy du
the seeds from which all motion of particles in the universe could potentially be deduced. It deserved to be called a Theory of Everything. I say ‘seeds’ because it required other scientists to grow these seeds and apply them to more complex settings than Newton’s solar system made up of point particles of mass. For example, in their original form the laws are not suited to describing the motion of less rigid bodies or bodies that deform. It was the great eighteenth-century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler who would provide equations that generalized Newton’s laws. Euler’s equations could be applied more generally to something like a vibrating string or a swinging pendulum.
More and more equations appeared that controlled various natural phenomena. Euler produced equations for non-viscous fluids. At the beginning of the nineteenth century French mathematician Joseph Fourier found equations to describe heat flow. Fellow compatriots Pierre-Simon Laplace and Siméon-Denis Poisson took Newton’s equations to produce more generalized equations for gravitation, which were then seen to control other phenomena like hydrodynamics and electrostatics. The behaviours of viscous fluids were described by the Navier–Stokes equations, and electromagnetism by Maxwell’s equations.
With the discovery of the calculus and the laws of motion, it seemed that Newton had turned the universe into a deterministic clockwork machine controlled by mathematical equations. Scientists believed they had indeed discovered the Theory of Everything. In his Philosophical Essay on Probabilities published in 1812, the mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace summed up most scientists’ belief in the extraordinary power of mathematics to tell you everything about the physical universe.
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
This view that, in theory, the universe was knowable, both past and present, became dominant among scientists in the centuries following Newton’s great opus. It seemed as if any idea of God acting in the world had been completely removed. A God might be responsible for getting things up and running, but from that point on the equations of mathematics and physics took over.
So what of my lowly dice? Surely with the laws of motion at hand I can simply combine the geometry of the cube with the initial direction of motion and the subsequent interactions with the table to predict the outcome? I’ve written out the equations on my notepad and they look pretty daunting.
Newton too contemplated the problem of trying to predict the dice. Newton’s interest was prompted by a letter he received from Samuel Pepys. Pepys wanted Newton’s advice on which option he should back in a wager he was about to make with a friend:
(1) Throwing six dice and getting at least one 6
(2) Throwing twelve dice and getting at least two 6s
(3) Throwing eighteen dice and getting at least three 6s
Pepys was about to stake £10, the equivalent of £1000 in today’s money, and he was quite keen to get some good advice. Pepys’s intuition was that (3) was the more likely option, but Newton replied that the mathematics implied the opposite was true. He should put his money on the first option. However, it wasn’t his laws of motion and the calculus to which Newton resorted to solve the problem but the ideas developed by Fermat and Pascal.
But even if Newton could have solved the equations I’ve written out to describe the trajectory of the dice, there turned out to be another problem that could scupper any chance of knowing the future of my dice. Although Pascal was talking about his wager with God, there is an interesting line in his analysis which throws a spanner in the works when it comes to knowing the future: ‘Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us.’
THE FATE OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM
If Newton is my hero, then French mathematician Henri Poincaré should be the villain in my drive to predict the future. And yet I can hardly blame him for uncovering one of the most devastating blows for anyone wanting to know what’s going to happen next. He was hardly very thrilled himself with the discovery, given that it cost him rather a lot of money.
Born a hundred years after Laplace, Poincaré believed, like his compatriot, in a clockwork universe, a universe governed by mathematical laws and utterly predictable. ‘If we know exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we can predict exactly the situation of the same universe at a succeeding moment.’
Understanding the world was Poincaré’s prime motivation for doing mathematics. ‘The mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge of a physical law.’
Although Newton’s laws of motion had spawned an array of mathematical equations to describe the evolution of the physical world, most of them were still extremely complicated to solve. Take the equations for a gas. Think of the gas as made up of molecules crashing around like tiny billiard balls, and theoretically the future behaviour of the gas was bound up in Newton’s laws of motion. But the sheer number of balls meant that any exact solution was well beyond reach. Statistical or probabilistic methods were still by far the best tool to understand the behaviour of billions of molecules.
There was one situation where the number of billiard balls was reasonably small and a solution seemed tractable. The solar system. Poincaré became obsessed with the question of predicting what lay in store for our planets as they danced their way into the future.
Because the gravitational pull of a planet on another planet at some distance from the first planet is the same as if all the mass of the planet is concentrated at its centre of gravity, to determine the ultimate fate of the solar system one can consider planets as if they are just points in space, as Newton had done. This means that the evolution of the solar system can be described by three coordinates for each planet that locate the centre of mass in space together with three additional numbers recording the speed in each of the three dimensions of space. The forces acting on the planets are given by the gravitational forces exerted by each of the other planets. With all this information one just needs to apply Newton’s second law to map out the course of the planets into the distant future.
The only trouble is that the maths is still extremely tricky to work out. Newton had solved the behaviour of two planets (or a planet and a sun). They would follow elliptical paths, with their common focal point being the common centre of gravity. This would repeat itself periodically to the end of time. But Newton was stumped when he introduced a third planet. Trying to calculate the behaviour of a solar system consisting, say, of the Sun, the Earth and the Moon seemed simple enough, but already you are facing an equation in 18 variables: 9 for position and 9 for the speed of each planet. Newton conceded that ‘to consider simultaneously all these causes of motion and to define these motions by exact laws admitting of easy calculation exceeds, if I am not mistaken, the force of any human mind’.
The problem got a boost when King Oscar II of Norway and Sweden decided to mark his sixtieth birthday by offering a prize for solving a problem in mathematics. There are not many monarchs around the world who would choose maths problems as their way to celebrate their birthdays, but Oscar had always enjoyed the subject ever since he had excelled at it when he was a student at Uppsala University.
His majesty Oscar II, wishing to give a fresh proof of his interest in the advancement of mathematical science has resolved to award a prize on January 21, 1889, to an important discovery in the field of higher mathematical analysis. The prize will consist of a gold medal of the eighteenth size bearing his majesty’s image and having a value of a thousand francs, together with the sum of two thousand five hundred crowns.
Three eminent mathematicians convened to choose a number of suitable mathematical challenges and to judge