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Letter: Roughly sunrise

Published 20 October 2004

From Paul Loader, University of Sussex

Stewart says: “Quantum stuff apart, we can state with assurance that there really is no such thing as randomness.”

What we call the randomness of an event may be relative to a particular level of description of that event, but this isn’t to say such randomness doesn’t exist. What we generally mean by randomness is unpredictability from a typical or relevant standpoint. This standpoint is rarely that of an omniscient being, so whatever discoveries are made at a micro level, people will continue quite justifiably to describe some things as random and others as not.

Brighton, Sussex, UK

Issue no. 2470 published 23 October 2004

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