this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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Well that's a bit close minded.
Perhaps at some point we will conquer quantum mechanics enough to be able to observe particles at every place and time they have ever and will ever exist. Do that with enough particles and you've got a de facto time machine, albeit a read-only one.
So many things we believe to be true today suggest this is not going to happen. The uncertainty principle, and the random nature of nuclear decay chief among them. The former prevents you gaining the kind of information you would need to do this, and the latter means that even if you could, it would not provide the kind of omniscience one might assume.
Limits of quantum observation aside, you also could never physically store the data of the position/momentum/state of every particle in any universe within that universe, because the particles that exist in the universe are the sum total of the materials with which we could ever use to build the data storage. You've got yourself a chicken-and-egg scenario where the egg is 93 billion light years wide, there.
Complexity relates nonlinearly to the amount of moving parts.
We might be able to spend an ungodly amount of energy to do that for one particle for an hour of its existence.
Being able to build a computer (in a wide sense) that can emulate in short time (less than human life) processes consistent of more energy than was spent on its creation - it's something else.