Pierre-Simon Laplace was one of the first mathematicians who took an interest in problems of probability and determinism. It’s surprising how much of the math and applied physics that Laplace developed gets used in day-to-day analysis. For example, while working on the ENSO and QBO analysis, I have invoked the following topics at some point:
- Laplace’s tidal equations
- Laplace’s equation
- Laplacian differential operator
- Laplace transform
- Difference equation
- Planetary and lunar orbital perturbations
- Probability methods and problems
- Inductive probability
- Bayesian analysis, e.g. the Sunrise problem
- Statistical methods and applications
- Central limit theorem
- Least squares
- Filling in holes of Newton’s differential calculus
- Others here
Apparently he did so much and was so comprehensive that in some of his longer treatises he often didn’t cite the work of others, making it difficult to pin down everything he was responsible for (evidently he did have character flaws).
In any case, I recall applying each of the above in working out some aspect of a problem. Missing was that Laplace didn’t invent Fourier analysis but the Laplace transform is close in approach and utility.
When Laplace did all this research, he must have possessed insight into what constituted deterministic processes:
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.— Pierre Simon Laplace,
A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities[wikipedia]
He also seemed to be a very applied mathematician, as per a quote I have used before “Probability theory is nothing but common sense reduced to calculation.” Really nothing the least bit esoteric about any of Laplace’s math, as it seemed always motivated by solving some physics problem or scientific observation. It appears that he wanted to explain all these astronomic and tidal problems in as simple a form as possible. Back then it may have been esoteric, but not today as his techniques have become part of the essential engineering toolbox. I have to wonder if Laplace were alive now whether he would agree that geophysical processes such as ENSO and QBO were equally as deterministic as the sun rising every morning or of the steady cyclic nature of the planetary and lunar orbits. And it wasn’t as if Laplace possessed confirmation bias that behaviors were immediately deterministic; as otherwise he wouldn’t have spent so much effort in devising the rules of probability and statistics that are still in use today, such as the central limit theorem and least squares.
Perhaps he would have glanced at the ENSO problem for a few moments, noticed that in no way that it was random, and then casually remarked with one his frequent idiomatic phrases:
“Il est aisé à voir que…” … or .. (“It is easy to see that…”).
It may have been so obvious that it wasn’t important to give the details at the moment, only to fill in the chain of reasoning later. Much like the contextEarth model for QBO, deriving from Laplace’s tidal equations.
Where are the Laplace’s of today that are willing to push the basic math and physics of climate variability as far as it will take them? It has seemingly jumped from Laplace to Lorenz and then to chaotic uncertainty ala Tsonis or mystifying complexity ala Lindzen. Probably can do much better than to punt like that … on first down even !