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The idea of something being truly random bothers me because it goes against cause and effect. An effect happened without a cause. It violates laws of conserva

• lutusp 13y ago
  > The idea of something being truly random bothers me because it goes against cause and effect. Not at all. The fact that one cannot predict the next number in a random sequence is irrelevant to the fact that, in the long term, that number has a predictable relationship with other numbers in the pool of possibilities. For a random generator of the digits 0-9, can I predict the next number in the sequence? No. Can I say what the proportion of, say, 7s will be, within a large list of outcomes? Yes, and the larger the list, the more reliable the prediction. If your position had merit, quantum theory, probabilistic on a small scale, would be seen as violating cause/effect relationships, a rather important part of physical theory. But, because of the mathematics of quantum probability, individually unpredictable atoms become very predictable macroscopic objects.
• sveit 13y ago
  If I toss a coin into the air and then it lands on tails, there is a visible cause and effect. The velocity of my arm, the position of the coin in my hand, the moment of release, the air currents in the room all affect the outcome. If I could measure these to a high degree of accuracy and plug the measurements into a detailed enough simulation, I could predict the outcome. However, I can't. So I am unable to predict the outcome (hence the outcome is random).