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RESEARCH PRODUCT

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

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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.