20. Randomness

I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.

— Albert Einstein

We must digress to have a discussion about ran­domness. To a high-level observer, much of what goes on in DM appears random. Certain struc­tures last for a random amount of time before disintegrating into other structures. The way in which disintegrations take place seems to also hap­pen at random. Yet we have said that DM is a deterministic system! The answer lies in the re­lationship between superposition and interaction. By far the most common kinds of local events in­volve a superposition principle, so that the flow of information proceeds outward in every direc­tion, virtually unimpeded by whatever is going on in the space that it traverses. In a large RUCA, where every digit can be written as a function over most of space-time, we can see why each partic­ular digit seems random. Digits throughout most of space-time have a causal relationship to a digit that is here and now. Normally this randomness is not noticed by processes because of superposi­tion; however, every so often one of these random configurations of digits interacts with some pro­cess, and determines one of several outcomes. It seems random, it mimics randomness, but it is not random. It is not even orthogonal or independent. Yet it can produce statistical results one would ex­pect of random processes. It is interesting to note that from a computational point of view, a locally determined truly random number is very compu­tationally expensive. If it is truly random, then it is like a real number, and might need unlimited computational resources just to compute one such number. In DM, we get the benefit without the cost; and we can expect a mechanistic explana­tion of statistical correlations of distant events.