Perché è difficile prevedere il futuro. Il sogno più sfuggente dell’uomo sotto la lente della fisica

Magicians and fortune-tellers, oracles and prophets: since time immemorial we tried to predict the future, with disappointing and often awful results. But this is not the same old book written by the same old scientists who tell that every possible effort to predict the future is going to be a failure or a fraud. On the contrary, the idea is that predictions are the main results of science, and especially of physics.

From the projectile trajectory to the height of tides, from earthquakes to weather forecast, we are going to examine how physics is (more or less) capable of foreseeing the “future” and why some predictions are better than others – Spoiler: the secret depends on chaos theory, on quantum mechanics or on something like this.