Talk:Pierre-Simon Laplace

Some discussion of the attribution of the Laplace/Napoleon anecdote in this Reddit thread 145.120.0.239 20:47, 27 March 2009 (UTC): http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/869ta/does_anyone_know_what_book_first_reported/

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 * 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.

That's from Théorie analytique des probabilités (1812). It is critical this quotation be added to the article. JKeck (talk) 20:57, 16 September 2019 (UTC)