Is there true randomness in the universe?
In: 80
Not at any scale useful to humans, though we can get close enough for many applications.
Let’s say you were rolling a fair die. There’s a 1 in 6 chance of any result before you roll. But once you do, the result is determined by how you move your hand, air currents in the room, the surface it is being rolled onto, and so on. If the starting conditions were copied exactly, the result would be the same every time. And if you had infinite knowledge of everything except the result of that roll, you would be able to predict it perfectly, so it is not truly random.
However, humans do not have the ability to control for all those factors, so for most people, the die roll functions as a random event.
At the subatomic level, we don’t know enough to determine if there is true randomness. It’s possible that, the moment of the Big Bang, everything in the history of the universe was fixed by physics we don’t yet understand.
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