Abstract
Somewhere, in any computer-based Monte Carlo simulation, is a line of code that produces random numbers. With names like RANDU, RANDOM, RANF, or RNDM, the command is innocuous, a single, practically invisible step in a program that could run to hundreds of lines. Indeed, in the 1960s, the then-standard IBM 709 came oufitted with a random generator that was used around the world to produce simulations of phenomena ranging from nuclear weapons and airplane wings to the impact of pions on protons, from weather modelling to the analysis of number theory. In this brief paper, I want to take out the philosophical magnifying glass and peer into the epistemological and metaphysical changes at work behind the code.
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© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Galison, P. (2000). Random Philosophy. In: Agazzi, E., Pauri, M. (eds) The Reality of the Unobservable. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 215. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9391-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9391-5_7
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