Thursday, April 05, 2007
Is anything truly random?
This question came up Seder night. I contend that nothing is random. When a deck of cards is thrown in the air the place, position, and even route where each card will land is determined by air flow, force, weather, and a million other small things. We call things random b/c we don't understand what causes them. A random thought is only a thought that we've no conscious understanding of where it came from. An example brought to prove that things can be random was Brownian Motion. This is the motion of molecules which both keep them in a fixed position; ie nothing falls apart b/c of their movement; and allows them to move in all sorts of directions with no possible explanation as to why. Of course this is still not random. Each molecule moves in response to a myriad of conditions which affect it. We are still incapable of analyzing those effects, and how they can affect a molecule, but their existence shouldn't be doubted.