The scientist argued that randomness does not exist

I once heard a Nobel Prize-winning scientist talk about randomness, and something he said has stuck with me: What is randomness? he asked. The chances of something specifically happening at a certain time and place are astronomical, and yet every second of every day is filled with these unlikely events. You drop a dime on the floor. It rolls in a spiral, then twirls to a standstill. What are the odds that could happen exactly the same way again? Millions, maybe trillions, to one. And yet it happened as naturally as if there were no odds against it. Every event in our lives happens as if there were no odds against it. The scientist argued that randomness does not exist. We have operational definitions, he asserted, definitions that work for a certain series of circumstances and conditions, but we don’t have an absolute definition that works in all cases.

20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them by Ronald B Tobias