Chance is uncanny to us. We thought it didn't exist, that God or a
reasonable explanation was behind everything. But we know today: It
exists. We know that much of what surrounds us and which we do not see
through, nevertheless runs causally. Unlike what was thought in the days
of the Enlightenment, chance is the rule around us rather than lawful
order. The clouds are stochastic fractals, the waves on the sea are pure
random machinery. The philosopher Charles Peirce recognized the
fundamental importance of chance in precisely this sense, even before
quantum and chaos theory, and gave the doctrine its name: Tychism.
Without chance there would be nothing new, no life, no creativity, no
history.
This book looks at chance from the perspective of physics, computer
science, and philosophy. It spans from antiquity to quantum physics and
shows that chance is firmly built into the world and that it would not
exist without chance.
This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition
Der Zufall in Physik, Informatik und Philosophie by Walter Hehl,
published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature
in 2021. The translation was done with the help of artificial
intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A
subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so
that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional
translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the
development of tools for the production of books and on the related
technologies to support the authors.
