"God doesn't play dice."
I'm sure the reader has heard this famous saying from Einstein in a 1926 letter to fellow physicist Max Born. Perhaps not so clear to most people is what God and what dice Einstein was referring to. His worries reflect a deep concern about how far our explanations of Nature can go. They speak to the heart of what science is, an issue that remains contentious to this day.
Einstein was referring to quantum physics, the physics that describes the behavior of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles — like electrons and the Higgs boson. The "dice" relate to probabilities, the fact that in the quantum world the cozy determinism of our classical worldview goes down the drain.
In our everyday life objects follow well-behaved histories from point A to point B. In the realm of the very small this determinism fails completely. We can, at most, compute probabilities that a particle will be at this or that point in space (within the accuracy of the measuring device). Even more bizarre, before we detect a particle we can't even tell if it exists. All we have is potentiality.
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