Predictability: what can be predicted?

With the progress of science and technology, we have the impression that the future is increasingly predictable, and that we could definitely anticipate catastrophes, determine their impacts and limit their damage. Indeed, this was the old dream of Laplace, whose demon "for a given instant, would know all the forces of which nature is animated, and the respective situation of the beings that compose it, and would be able to embrace in the same formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom: nothing is uncertain for [him], and the future, like the past, is present to his eyes."

There are, however, fields where uncertainty is the order of the day, even on large scales (and therefore outside the quantum regime), either because the equations of motion are not known (this is the case in fields involving living agents, such as the human and social sciences or market finance), or because they involve too many scales (such as climatology or seismology). The aim of this conference is to bring together the viewpoints of these different fields in an interdisciplinary approach, to fertilize and enrich our mutual knowledge. We purposely leave aside the case of quantum mechanics, which concerns smaller scales and for which uncertainty is engraved in the laws, and not emergent as in the fields mentioned above.

This conference is organized by Bérengère Dubrulle, member of the Académie des sciences, director of research at the CNRS and Josselin Garnier, member of the Académie des sciences, professor at the École polytechnique.

[PROGRAM AND REGISTRATION TO COME]