We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its previous state and as the cause of the one that is to follow. An intelligence which, at a given instant, knew all the forces that animate nature and the respective situation of the beings that compose it, and which was vast enough to submit these data to analysis, would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom: nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes. — Pierre-Simon Laplace, Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1814)