Wasn't it Michael Ash who wrote:
>In another thread which shall remain nameless, it a scenario was posited
>in which a time traveller arrives and hands over the winning lottery
>numbers to a stranger, said numbers having been dug up from historical
>archives in the far future. A great deal of discussion on the other
>particulars of the scenario took place and I hope we can avoid repeating
>that, but interestingly this aspect was never questioned.
I've heard it said that if you consider a frictionless snooker table
with perfectly spherical snooker balls and track 100 collisions, then
the outcome is so sensitive to the initial conditions that the
gravitational effect of a single electron at the distance of Alpha
Centauri can completely alter the result.
Each sphere-on-sphere collision that the cue ball experiences doubles
the difference in the angle, so after 100 collisions, the change in
angle is multiplied by 1.2*10^30 which is enough for extremely tiny
changes in the initial conditions to become significant.
Things might possibly be different in a lottery machine which
experiences friction and is subject to quantum effects, but I suspect
that the gravitational effect of the time traveller's body would be
sufficient to scramble lottery results.
Quantum effects might act in two different directions. If a difference
in position is less than the Planck Length, then I guess it would cause
zero effect and the lottery results would be unaffected. The uncertainly
principle causes tiny differences in the motions of the balls, which
when amplified might be sufficient to scramble the lottery results. This
might mean that a lottery machine would produce different results even
if the initial conditions were *exactly* the same.
--
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure
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