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Explore the children of light and darkness in physics—how differential equations predict future conditions.

Written bySean Carroll
| 1 min read
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Children of light and children of darkness is the vision of physics that emerges from this chapter, as from other branches of physics. The children of light are the differential equations that predict the future from the present. The children of darkness are the factors that fix these initial conditions.

-- Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, Gravitation (1973), p. 555.

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