<p>You hear the word "quantum" used a lot in popular culture & quack science, though its origins is real science. It was postulated by German physicist Max Planck in 1900, for which he won the Nobel Prize, but what does it really mean? Ironically enough, it means the opposite of what Einstein said it meant when he quipped, "God does not play dice." Oh, but He does. Quantum mechanics is the theory that life is not deterministic, meaning it can only be predicted statistically, even though the equations look a lot like physics. On the one hand, physics assumes the universe is a giant clockwork, and knowing the precise attributes of the gears can predict the precise outcome of the process, but Quantum Theory is almost the exact opposite, that the universe is random, that its components & sub-particles must be guesstimated for a probabilistic outcome. In computer science we use term "stochastic," meaning randomly determined patterns, and in economics it sounds a lot like "emergent order," the Classical Liberal political & economic philosophy that randomness spontaneously creates organized results, and, of course, there's the theory of evolution. When so many divergent sources come to the same conclusion, it seems likely that quantum theory is indeed the secret of the universe.</p>
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