The experimental failure of macroscopic determinism: the case of an electrocardiogram

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that determinism, a fundamental concept in physics, is experimentally incompatible with recorded electrocardiogram data, challenging assumptions about predictability in macroscopic systems.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental test of macroscopic determinism using electrocardiogram data, revealing contradictions under a plausible separability assumption.

Findings

Determinism contradicts ECG outcomes under certain assumptions.

Experimental evidence challenges the classical view of macroscopic predictability.

Results suggest limitations of deterministic models in biological systems.

Abstract

Even if never elucidated, the question of determinism is a standing question along the history of human thinking. A physical system evolves in a deterministic way if its future is completely determined once we have fixed some present characteristics of it, i.e., its initial conditions. The problem addressed in the present paper is to test determinism in the macroscopic domain. By imposing a very plausible ``separability'' assumption, we prove that determinism enters in contradiction with the recorded outcomes of a given electrocardiogram. The interest of this result comes from the fact such a basic idea as determinism has never been experimentally tested up to now in the macroscopic domain, and as far as we know not even in the quantum domain.