Determination

Randomness is an illusion. Every outcome is the result of a continuous chain of events, which is unique and inevitable.

Each of us has already experienced a situation that seemed completely unexpected. The outcome was different from what we anticipated, and we might have felt the intervention of a higher power or pure chance.

We all know examples of such events:

• a driver falls asleep, the car ends up in a ditch, but a tree stops it at the right place
• someone enters numbers in a lottery and wins
• in a crashed airplane, only one person survives in seat 11a
• a delayed train allows people to be saved from a bus stuck on the tracks
• a computer generates a “random” number

At first glance it seems to be chance. But in reality it is the result of an immensely complex chain of events.

Determination means that everything happens according to certain laws. Every outcome is the inevitable consequence of previous causes. The fact that the driver did not fall off a cliff depended on countless factors:

• the road was built on a hill with a specific slope
• years ago wind and rain planted and kept alive a tree seed
• a worn-out tire had a certain grip on the road
• asphalt was heated by the sun at a given angle due to time, location, and season
• the wind resisting the vehicle blew precisely as allowed by temperature changes influenced by nearby seas
• the driver’s hands were tired from exercising the day before and he did not hold the steering wheel as usual
• and much more

All these factors combined and led to a single outcome.

Even computer “random” numbers are not truly random. They are generated according to an algorithm, which is always deterministic at its core and which we can replicate. For computers there also exist so-called “true random numbers” based on phenomena such as radioactive decay, temperature fluctuations, or the timing of keystrokes. Yet even these phenomena are in their essence deterministic. They are simply so complex that we cannot calculate them precisely.

What we consider chance is in reality an interwoven chain of causes and effects whose complexity exceeds our ability to identify a clear beginning or origin.

Modern physics agrees with this approach. Ordinary phenomena are described deterministically: if we know the state of a system and the laws governing it, we can precisely determine its future. In quantum physics, however, everything begins to change. Determinism is replaced by the concept of probability. For example, the radioactive decay of an isotope used in computers cannot be predicted exactly, we can only determine the probability of when it might occur. We call this quantum uncertainty.

Yet at the fundamental level, which we currently regard as the physical quantum, lies the basis of everything: Nothing. Nothing is the emptiness around us and it is not bound by space or time. Therefore by stretching across Nothing we can also explain quantum phenomena that today we consider random.

More about how modern physicists explain this and what role Nothing may play in it will be written later in the blog.