Does God Play Dice?

"When you roll a die, any one of the six possible faces may end up on top. The result of throwing a die is like an eigenstate - it is a special state that is selected by the measurement process. [...] A Copenhagenist would say that the presence of a table mysteriously causes a die to 'collapse' to one of the states 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, an that the rest of the time it is in a superposition of those eigenstates - which is, of course, a mathematical fiction with no intrinsic physical meaning. Bohm would say that it does have a physical meaning but you can't observe it - at least with any conventional apparatus, and perhaps not at all. Diosi-to-Percival would say that as the die rolls along the table its state randomly jiggles, and eventually settles down to one of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. [...]
The imgae of dice suggest that they might all be right -
- and all wrong.

Chaos teaches us that anybody, God or cat, can play dice deterministically, while to naive onlooker imagines that something random is going on. The Copenhagenists and Bohm do not notice the dynamical twists and turns of the rolling die as it bounces erratically but deterministically across the table-top. [...] Diosi-to-Percival notice the erratic jiggles of the die [...], not realising that underneath they are actually deterministic.
Nobody tries to write down the equations for a rolling die. [...] One good reason is that they think it can't be done."

This extract helps me to understand the different ideas around chaos and quantum theory. It is also the first extract that has made me see a connection between the two concepts. It isn't possible to determine the state of a die before it lands on a number - this is the same idea of a decaying nucleus. Only when it actually happens, can we determine its state.

The last part of this extract supports the point that I made about randomness just being events that we cannot mathematically model because of its complexity.