“The ‘intellect’ of Laplace’s imagination eventually received a name—‘Laplace’s demon’—and it has been lurking around the edges of mankind’s view of the future ever since. For philosophers, the demon was controversial because in reducing the prediction of the future to a mechanical exercise, it seemed to rob humanity of free will. As it turned out, though, they needn’t have worried too much. Starting with the second law of thermodynamics, and continuing through quantum mechanics and finally chaos theory, Laplace’s idea of a clockwork universe—and it’s concerns about free will—has been receding for more than a century now.”