The universe that Lamoureux and my philosopher friend at the conference were envisioning is a universe that would, like balls on a billiards table, unfold in a perfectly predictable and deterministic way.27 That depiction matches the early nineteenth-century understanding of physics championed by Pierre Laplace, who thought that if scientists knew the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of physics, they could calculate every subsequent state with precision. But it does not match the universe as described by twenty-first-century physics or information theory.28
