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I’ve been thinking more about the question as to whether, were the Big Bang to be run again, every individual event would happen exactly the same as has happened this time around.  On the surface, it would appear that there is too much random chance for that to happen, as we pointed out in class.  However, the more I think about it, the more it seems vaguely possible that what we perceive as chance is actually predetermined and in fact deterministic.  In the cast of Langton’s Ant, it looked at first like the ant was moving randomly until it began building the road.  Upon replaying the model, we saw that the “random motion” could be re-created no matter how many times you run the simulation.  The key here is that it took a second running for us to recognize it.  Since we cannot and have not (to the best of my knowledge) replayed any sequence of time, we can’t yet recognize that what we think of as chance isn’t random at all.  Assuming this is true, the Time Paradox makes sense.  If one were to go back in time and change something in the past, the program would be altered and would fail to progress as planned.  Alternately, if one were to get a glimpse of their future self and as a result try to change the course of their life, the program would also be altered. 

       The opening scene in Tom Stoppard’s play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” illustrates what I’m trying to express.  The two title characters have been flipping a coin for awhile, and every time it has come up heads.  They talk about how it shouldn’t be surprising each individual time the coin comes up heads, because chance tells them that it is just as likely to come up heads as tails.  They also talk about how they could potentially be trapped in a time loop where they are not spinning a single coin multiple times but are replaying a single coin spin multiple times; hence the result is always the same.  If that were the case, it is a prime example of a deterministic system.  If you replay an even in exactly the same way, it gives you the same result every time.  This may be a simple example, but it does help support my idea that randomness is just a narrow perspective of a deterministic system.  After all, without knowing the rules of Langton’s Ant, we couldn’t predict its outcome.  Maybe we just aren’t familiar enough with the overlaying rules of the universe to have the perspective that would allow us to eradicate the concept of randomness.