Random thought
Question: How can there be such a concept as “random”? Surely everything has
a structure if you look deeply enough. What does random actually mean?
Answer: Random was originally a soldier’s term meaning “forcefully”, as
opposed to “carefully” (Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, OUP,
1966). Therefore, if something was thrown “at random” the result was
unpredictable. Although the Oxford English Dictionary’s 1989 definition
focuses on it meaning “haphazard” or “aimless”, the word random is often used to
mean “unpredictable”, which is the outcome of a haphazard or aimless action. But
is anything really unpredictable?
There was a…
