Is it theoretically possible to reconstruct physical scenes in the past from current physical situation?

Question

I have lately been in a rural area. In this rural area, my father had a hunting lodge. It was a very special place for me as I spent many exiting days of my childhood there.

30 years later, my father is dead, the hunting lodge is still there. The trees around it have changed very much, they became much more dense.

The hunting lodge was deserted. I felt it hard to grasp emotionally that these days are gone and that nobody - except me - will ever know what happened there.

Back then, we already had VHS video tapes, and I filmed many scenes in that place, so I can even more vividly remember it. However, nobody who had not seen it could ever believe all the things that happened there.

I know that there is no such possibility, but I would like to know in general:

Would it be theoretically possible (from the physical footprints that people, animals and cars, etc. left at that point of time) to reconstruct what happened at day X?

I mean "footprint" in broader sense. Not just foot, but just the impact of the body (for example on the air which then (in some way affected trees because they grew like 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000001 % more to one side because a car pressed the air next to it to some degree).

I guess this is somewhat related to weather prediction. It is extremely difficult to predict weather from some facts, but it seems do-able.

So I would like to ask if it (with an appropriate approach) would theoretically be possible to reconstruct scenes from day X by the given current physical circumstances?

I do not mean emotional scenes, but simply physical scenes.

Answer 1

Short answer: no.

The difficulty is exactly the same as predicting the future given the current physical situation.

It can work for short amounts of time and simple situations: I see a car moving at a certain constant velocity, I can guess where the car will be in 10 seconds, provided the speed velocity remains constant.

However, as you want to go further in time you’ll fail since a prediction would require an exceptionally detailed knowledge of the current physical state of the world, or the knowledge of events very far away from you.

You might be interested in reading about chaos theory and the butterfly effect. Remember that given the current state of a physical system, predicting the future is equally difficult as reconstructing the past.

Disclaimer: I am not taking into account stuff related to entropy and to the arrow of time, since I don’t think it’s very relevant to the question being asked, hence my claim that (in the present context) predicting the future and inferring the past are equally difficult. Also, for clarity’s sake I am not considering quantum mechanics, which would make things even more complicated!