What is randomness (in practice)

By Oliver López-Corona for Anti-fragilista

This short essay emerged from a random conversation on Twitter with Nacho and others about the following aphorism in “The Bed of Procrustes”:

“Randomness is indistinguishable from complicated, undetected, and undetectable order; but order itself is indistinguishable from artful randomness.”

The first part of the aphorism : “Randomness is indistinguishable from complicated, undetected, and undetectable order…” I think it tries to capture the notion that in practice, randomness is a lack of information; in contrast with theoretical perspective that may see Randomness as an intrinsic property of the systems.

Let us think in a experiment in which we want to measure the mechanical parameters of an electron: its position and momentum[1]. In order to measure these parameters we need to observe the particle, that requires for example that a photon (light) to interact with it and from the reflected photon we may infer where the photon was and with which velocity. And I’m using past tense because the moment the photon hits the electron it changes its position and velocity. But more importantly Heisenberg discovered in 1927 that for systems as the electron, there are paired variables that cannot be measured with an arbitrary precision simultaneously. In fact this fundamental…