"OH, I am fortune's fool," says Romeo. Rest easy, lover boy; we all are. Or are we?
Romeo, having killed Tybalt and realising he must leave Verona or risk death, was expressing a view common in Shakespeare's time: that we are all marionettes, with some higher cause pulling the strings. Chance – let alone our own decision-making – plays little part in the unravelling of cosmic designs.
Even processes that inherently involved chance were pre-determined. Long before dice were used for gaming, they were used for divination. Ancient thinkers thought the gods determined the outcome of a die roll; the apparent randomness resulted from our ignorance of divine intentions.
Oddly, modern science at first did little to change that view. Isaac Newton devised laws of motion and gravitation that connected everything in the cosmos with a mechanism run by a ...
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