The common element was randomness, Chaitin suddenly thought. Shannon linked randomness, perversely, to information. Physicists had found randomness inside the atom—the kind of randomness that Einstein deplored by complaining about God and dice. All these heroes of science were talking about or around randomness.

Israeli physicist named Yakir Aharonov basically agreed with Einstein about God not playing dice, and he proposed that the future is the hidden variable underlying quantum strangeness. Individual particles, such as those photons passing through the slits of the double-slit experiment, are actually influenced by what will happen to them next (i.e.,

Aharonov and his colleague Jeff Tollaksen write that time-symmetric reformulations of quantum mechanics change the meaning of uncertainty from ‘capriciousness’ to exactly what is needed in order that the future can be relevant to the present, without violating causality, thereby providing a new perspective on the question ‘Why does God play dice?’