Indeterminist physics for an open world

Classical physics is characterized by the precision of its equations describing the evolution of the world as determined by the initial conditions of the Big Bang—meaning there is no room for chance. Yet our day-to-day experience and intuition are struck by this deterministic vision of the world: has everything really been written in advance? Is randomness nothing more than an illusion? A physicist from UNIGE, Swizerland, has been analyzing the classical mathematical language used in modern physics. He has thrown light on a contradiction between the equations that are supposed to explain the phenomena that surround us and the finite world. He suggests making changes to the mathematical language to allow randomness and indeterminism to become part of classical physics, thereby bringing it closer to quantum physics. Thanks to these observations, which are published in the journal Nature Physics, a revolution is sweeping through classical physics and paving the way for potentially different futures.