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From Malcolm Shute, La Tour d'Aigues, France

Richard Webb says that free will is “often seen as the opposite of determinism” (15 February, p 34). Surely, though, it is randomness that is the true opposite of determinism.

It seems to me that free will is balanced on the knife-edge boundary between these states, in a way that is analogous to liquid existing on the line between gaseous and crystalline states.

Many articles in Â鶹´«Ã½ have commented on the special nature of this boundary between stasis and randomness, and the interesting and counter-intuitive chaotic behaviour that it leads to.

I see quantum mechanics, too, as positioned on the boundary of self-organised criticality between classical physical behaviour and weird interconnectedness (26 February 2011, p 36). Could there be a glimmer of a theory of everything here?