I went into this with about the same amount of knowledge as you buddy.

Clockwork Universe Theories
By

Note: I have no idea if the ideas mentioned are already thought up. I also have no idea how to write a scientific paper or anything similar.

A little while ago I was watching a youtube video and heard about this theory called the clockwork universe. It states that the universe is like a clock, ticking along time dependent on the laws of physics. That means if you know every single law of physics and literally everything about everything in the universe at a given time, you can accurately predict the past and the future.
This is related to mechanical philosophy and determinism. The main difference is that with a clockwork universe, the past and future can be predicted accurately. Because of this, clockwork universe theory is often found with mechanical philosophy.
It was first found in the 13th century in “On the Sphere of the World” by John of Sacrobosco. It was popularized during the Enlightenment when Sir Isaac Newton said that using the laws of physics, you could predict the future of the planets. Scientists currently don’t believe the theory is true because they don’t think quantum mechanics are predictable, and probably won’t until another Einstein comes along and has a revelation.
Ignoring the quantum mechanics part of this, I believe some parts of the theory are true and some aren’t. I think that in a couple thousand years, it will be possible to predict the past, but not the future, which would still be very useful. I’ll explain all of that and not much more here.

Predicting the Future

Here is my reasoning for why you can’t predict the future with this. The future will make a difference in the present if we predict it. For example, someone could go down a slightly different train of thought. Let’s say, someone sees someone poison a sandwich in the future. At lunch, they get a hot dog instead of a sandwich. The murderer sees that and decides to poison a hot dog instead. While looking for hot dogs, they get caught, where they wouldn’t have if they chose a sandwich.
Another example is if someone looks into the future and sees themselves go outside at exactly 11:53, but decides to go outside at 11:52 or 11:54 just because they saw themselves go outside at 11:53. Nothing is stopping them and all that happens is the prediction is inaccurate.
This might seem a bit extreme, but small changes can make a big difference. Someone could ponder something a little different and end up missing a world changing idea. It could even make a difference if a human doesn’t even see the future. One future could take a little more power for a computer, which could lead to someone losing all their work on a hacking project because the computer runs out of power, when the hacking project would have caused a disaster.
A computer could just run the future predicting code again with the new future in mind, but that would cause a difference which would make them have to run it again and again and on and on forever, so that won’t work. The probability of it stumbling upon a future where predicting it makes no change at all is probably around 10^-infinity%so that won’t work either. This doesn’t just go for predicting the future with the clockwork universe method, it probably goes for all methods. That is why I think predicting the future is impossible.

Accurately Viewing the Past

Unlike predicting the future, I do believe that you can accurately predict the past. I think this because the past has already happened so you can’t change it. This section is going to be about what you can do with that.
The first thing is to solve mysteries. I don’t know if that’s obvious or not but you could not only solve old mysteries like the Salem witch trials or the lost colony of Roanoke, but also recent crime cases. If a crime got reported to the police, then it happened in the past so they can see pretty much everything that happened and drop the decadal crime rate into the single digits. This could also be used to determine why people commit crimes so people could prevent the crimes from even happening in the first place.
Another thing it could be used for is bringing back dead people. If you think about it, almost everything that makes a person who they are is in their brain. This includes their personality, thoughts, skills, ect. This means that if you were able to look at someone’s brain right before they die and then make a 1:1 replica and put it in a new body, then you’ve essentially brought them back to life. So if you’re wondering what I think happens when you die, I say you wake up a couple thousand years in the future.

Other Notes

• I say in a couple thousand years, we’ll have this technology. I may sound ridiculous, but 200 years ago, the thought of being able to have a screen where you can share and view things from all around the world sounded ridiculous, so just imagine how far we’ve progressed since then, and multiply it by 100.
  
• We don’t need to know literally everything about literally everything in the universe to see the past, I don’t think something 5 billion lightyears away will affect a crime that happened yesterday. We will need to know a decent bit about the subatomic stuff though, we don’t want someone to make an atom splitter and have to wait a little less time so they decide not to improve on it.
  
• We need to know lots of information about objects such as the exact position, velocity, and direction of atoms down to the 100th decimal point.
  
• I have two choices, sign this or wait a little while for people to make this machine of the past to use it to find out who wrote it. Unless they decide to prove that Dream cheated instead.
  
• This could just not be invented at all.
  
• In another YouTube video, I heard about the butterfly effect, the idea that little things can have big impacts, such as a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a tornado in Texas. I mentioned the same idea in some places here. I didn’t know about it before recently and I feel like that would be good to note.
  
• When I say “a couple thousand years” I mean anywhere between 1,000 and 1,000,000 years.
  

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clockwork_universe
  

I hope someone found this interesting, or at least read it.

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Some aspects of quantum mechanics would affect this. Can we track quantum tunneling? Maybe.

Also the computing power to give enough accuracy might not even be possible. How do we simulate what every relevant atom does to every other atom?

One more thing: because the past has not developed technology to track particles, some of these particles may be lost. The nearest black hole is about 1000 light-years away, so if the machine is not built within 1000 years, the information could be lost.

but cool to think about