I'm not offended.
What exactly doesn't make much sense to you? Perhaps we are thinking quite the same things here. I think chance does exist. I think you can't known all influencing factors, like quantum mechanics says. Therefor 'chance' makes sense. That's my line of thought in a nutshell.
Quote:
"In practice " it can be extremely difficult or even impossible
Impossible things are quite useless I think. I mean, an aproximation might be very very useful, don't get me wrong, but when it comes to chance, this won't help much, you could still predict the outcome wrong, because you made some assumptions for the (more or less) unknown factors.
That way you'll be having a chance on your predicted chance's outcome, making the whole thing rather pointless.
When it comes to accuracy, don't you think it would matter bigtime not knowing all the factors? Having said that though, I don't think Newton's theory suffered from inaccuracy (if it even was inaccurate, I honestly don't know, but if he did leave out certain factors, it may have been not that accurate(?). )
I definately agree with the quantum mechanics's conclusion.
Problem with the 'classic mechanics' is that they assume the possibility of being able to know 'everything' in the ideal situation, in theory. This is not possible in practise, and even in theory you wouldn't be able to write down all x-factors, unless you write one big 'x' for every factor that's unknown as if it's one big one. This would make such an theory quite strange. Simplification is very common amongst scientific theories, I know this, but in this case I do not quite understand why they wish to simplify something, especially when everything matters so much.
Leave out the airfriction's influence for example, would the theory about the dice still be accurate enough? As in, being able to 100% predict what the outcome will be, every time? Personally, I don't think so. It's not about formulas being inaccurate or using approximations, it's about the result. When you don't know all factors, why pretend? It's no critics towards science or the scientific system of simplifying things, not at all. However I simply think there are some problems with that approach with this subject.
Cheers
