Determinists are a bunch of hippies
...was the verbal shout from across the room/desk. My colleague's vision on determinists. Are they hippies? Maybe its because there is an x in his last name, I don't know. But he has a point. Determinists are people that believe that the universe is governed by solid, deterministic laws. If you say you have free speech, they say it is only input-based output of the brain. Everything is a reaction to a cause. As the famous physicist Albert Einstein (No physics blog can do without him) said: "God doesn't play dice". He meant that there is no stochastic, chance-based effects in the world. The Universe is deterministic. However quantum mechanical observations disapprove this. In the quantum mechanics field, non-deterministic phenomenon are observed on a daily basis. Take for example the Heisenberg principle. If you know the location of the particle, you don't know its speed (exactly it is momentum, but that is the same as velocity times mass, so we d...