Fixed Future and Uncertain Past: Theorems Explain Why It Is Often More Difficult to Reconstruct the Past Than to Predict the Future
Goetz Alefeld, Misha Koshelev, Guenter Mayer · NASA University Research Centers Technical Advances in Education, Aeronautics, Space, Autonomy, Earth and Environment · 1997
At first glance. it may seem that reconstructing the past is, in general, easier than predicting the future, because the past has already occurred and it has already left its traces, while the future is still yet to come, and so no traces of the future are available. However, in many real life situations, including problems from geophysics and celestial mechanics, reconstructing the past is much more computationally difficult than predicting the future. In this paper, we give an explanation of this difficulty. This explanation is given both on a formal level (as a theorem) and on the informal level (as a more intuitive explanation).