The case against free will
Laplace’s demon is a little character that occasionally pops up in the history of physics. Pierre-Simon Laplace wrote about it in 1814 to describe the deterministic nature of our universe. Imagine a sneaky demon, who somehow knows the position and momentum of every particle in the universe. This demon will be able to know exactly what the universe did at some earlier time and, more importantly, precisely what it’ll do at some later point. In…