I just wrote an essay for UMichigan Honors for LSA. I spent two days writing the essay that said “discuss randomness,” but I applied to there college of engineering. I didn’t even know what LSA was until after I finished the essay. So to make sure it didn’t go to waste, do you want to read it?
“Everybody thinks they can do probability,” said my friend Stephen while we were sitting in the Mu Alpha Theta math club after school. Our vice-president, with a complicated explanation, answered the deceptively simple probability problem of a frog jumping from one lily pad to another. “They can’t,” I responded.
Probability and randomness are both abstract subjects that all children have been exposed to at an early age. A few years ago, when I was tutoring a student in combinatorics, we began a discussion on the gambler’s fallacy, an assumption that events that happened more than usual were unlikely to occur again. Although I explained to him that those events were independent and that the previous outcome had no effect on the next one, the student pointed out that in a fair coin toss the probability of a dime landing on heads in all 4 times it was flipped was 1/16, while the probability of the dime landing on all heads in the 5 times it was flipped was 1/32. Because of that, there must be a lower likelihood of getting 5 heads and a higher chance of getting 4 heads. Taken aback by this question, I tried to explain to him in the best way why his reasoning was faulty, but probability, and randomness inherent within it, is a difficult topic to comprehend.
In fact, some argue that randomness is nonexistent whatsoever. Randomness is defined as the lack of predictability and patterns in events, but isn’t everything predictable if one knows all the atoms and its movement in the universe? For example, if I flipped a coin, would the outcome be random? No, because every single variable, from air friction to the amount of energy I will use to flip the coin, will determine whether the coin will land face up or face down. A research experiment by Diaconis, Holmes, and Montgomery in “Dynamical Bias in the Coin Toss” proves that a coin has a higher likelihood to land the same way that it was flipped. For natural flipping, the chance of coming up as started is about .51, thus they concluded that coin-tossing is “physics” and not “random” (http://statweb.stanford.edu/~susan/papers/headswithJ.pdf). In addition, it was also reported that a spinning penny would land on its tail 80% of the time because of the extra weight on Lincoln’s head.
These experiments seem to support the determinists’ argument that, with every action, there is only one possible outcome. A famous determinist, Pierre-Simon Laplace, published one of the first articulations of causal determinism in 1814 named Laplace’s demon. Initially criticized for being impractical and the requirement to gather the all the data instantaneously (which we now believe is impossible because the universe expands faster than the speed of light), the theory stated that given the precise location and momentum of every particle in the universe at any one time, it is possible to predict the future and learn every detail about the past. But with developments in the fields of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, the natural world seems to create a different reality based on randomness. First, if we were to assume that we have all the information necessary to carry out the calculations to predict the future, there is a speculative limit on computations based on the maximum entropy of the universe and the shortest amount of time to move information across a Planck length. By taking approximations of the age and energy density of the Universe, Seth Lloyd of MIT estimated that the most basic operations the Universe could have performed is 10^120 bits; Laplace’s demon requires much more processing power, but this first problem could theoretically be circumvented by processing the information in a parallel universe (http://physics.aps.org/story/v9/st27 ). Second the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that the accuracy of measurements for position decreases with the accuracy of measurement of momentum. Thus, it would be impossible to know the exact velocities and positions of all the particles in the universe.
Einstein himself was not content with quantum mechanics and the notion of randomness, stating, “I am convinced God does not play dice.” This famous quote summarized Einstein’s views that would become the hidden variable theories, which suggested that the seemingly random physics of quantum particles, such as photons travelling through polarizers and radioactive decay, was caused by unknown factors. Later, contrary to Einstein’s beliefs, John Bell would disprove the hidden variable theories. Bell’s inequalities consisted of an experiment that fired entangled photons at two polarizers. The conclusion was that it’s impossible to predict the result of the experiment before doing the experiment.
The statement, “What’s going to happen is going to happen,” initially seems obvious, but advancements in modern science say otherwise. Randomness is intrinsic with the natural world, and with additional considerations like black holes and their property of completely destroying information that falls into it, the ability to predict the future is greatly inhibited. Whether or not there are hidden reasons to why some seemingly unpredictable events transpire, for all practical purposes we will assert that they are random.
Criticisms please…
Your essay is very well written! The only thing I would recommend is to look up MLA regulations on in-text citation. Usually it is not correct to place the entire URL of the website as your in-text. 
TY Taypowers