Home | Stories | The Illusion of the Coin Toss
The Illusion of the Coin Toss
(Pdf can be found below.)
he archetypal symbol of randomness
is the coin toss.
Heads or tails —
a flick of the thumb,
a tumble through air,
a
landing we cannot predict.
But is it truly random?
If we had perfect knowledge —
of our hand,
our thumb,
the friction
of our skin,
the wind in the room,
the softness of the landing —
couldn’t we flip heads
every single time?
What we call chance
is often just precision
we haven’t yet
mastered.
It isn’t the cosmos that’s uncertain.
It’s us.
We are the
blurred ones.
We are the variable.
This idea isn’t new.
Einstein resisted the dice.
David Bohm imagined a
hidden wave —
guiding every quantum ripple with invisible order.
And
Gerard ’t Hooft, physics Nobel laureate,
believes that what looks like
randomness
is only a veil —
our ignorance dressed in the costume of
chaos.
He suggests that even quantum events,
those jittering, flickering
particles
we call unpredictable,
may simply follow
a choreography
too subtle for us to detect.
We speak of “probability clouds,”
but perhaps they are not real things —
just shadows cast
by a deeper certainty
we cannot yet — and may
never perceive.
We say,
This cannot be known,
when we mean,
We are not
yet capable of knowing it.
Maybe,
some things are not just hard to see —
they are beyond what can
ever be seen.
Maybe some forms of “random”
live just past the
Gödel Horizon —
not because they lack pattern,
but
because their pattern
cannot be derived
from within the
system
we call a human mind.
And so the coin spins,
and we assign it mystery.
But the mystery may
not lie
in the motion of the coin,
nor in the laws that govern its
fall —
but in the limits of the one
who watches it land.
It may all be written.
Not as fate,
but as pattern.
Not as
bondage,
but as beauty too intricate to fake randomness.
Even what we call chaos
may turn out to be
the elegance of a
truth
we were never meant to solve —
only to experience,
to just live.
—William Zeitler
2025 July 7
You’re reading GrailHeart — devoted to what is best about being human.