A Probablility

People have always been fascinated with the future. Who do I marry? When and how do I die? It's in our nature to speculate and hope towards a certain outcome. "I hope that I win the lottery", or, "I hope it does't rain today." And these are all legitimate sources of hope and speculation. You might win the lottery. I might not rain today. But is there a way to know for sure?

Alber Einstein famously once said; "God does not play dice with the universe." He did not like to
believe that things like weather are random. He believed that you could predict the trajectory of a particle just as you could with a space ship. And many shared his views at the time. But he was, eventually, proven wrong.

If you go down small enough, to a quantum level, you begin to encounter odd things. Quantum tunneling and the likes. Things that are an example of Non-Zero Probability. In other words, things having a Non-Zero Probability of happening become more probable, and therefore easier to observe. This Non-Zero Probability shows the fundamental, probabilistic nature of the universe and reality itself. So there is a Non-Zero Probability of anything happening. The moon falling out of the sky. Things that seem impossible, but by the laws of quantum mechanics, aren't.

This fascinates me to no end. But let's assume, just for a second, that there was no Non-Zero Probability. That Quantum mechanics wasn't probabilistic. That means that you could accurately and absolutely predict a particle's interaction with all other particles. So, if we take a leaf out of Laplace's book, he said:

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
       —Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

In other words, if you were to be able to know the exact placement of every particle in the universe and it's juxtaposition to every other particle, then you could predict how all those particles would interact, and therefore know where all the other particles would be the next second. You could also deduct where the particles had been a second ago. This means that you could, in essence, predict the future. You would be able to know about all the interactions of all the particles because you know everything from an instant in the history of the universe. And with this power of predicting the future you would be able to predict people's future's as well, because, after all, we are part of the universe. And if we follow this path to the logical conclusion, then that means that you are predictable, down to an atomic scale.

And that means that free will is merely an illusion. When Einstein rejected randomness, he rejected the idea of a free human being. Luckily for you and me, he was wrong in this one thing. So we can all be grateful for the universe and it's essential randomness. It makes us fully, truly, human.