I have always liked the idea of predictability.
It probably started with dice.
I remember trying to throw a dice in what felt like exactly the same way.
Same direction.
Same strength.
Same movement.
Part of me thought I could somehow fool the system and force the same result again.
You roll once.
6
You try again.
3
Again.
1
The movement looked almost identical.
The result did not.
That stayed in my head for a long time.
At first, I thought prediction meant controlling the outcome.
Later I realized prediction could also mean understanding the pattern behind the outcome.
A dice has six sides.
Six equal possibilities.
P(event) = successful possibilities / all possibilities
If we want the probability of rolling a 3:
P(3) = 1 / 6
The exact outcome is uncertain.
I still do not know what the next roll will be.
But the structure behind the outcomes is predictable.
If we roll the dice only once, anything can happen.
But if we roll it many times, patterns start appearing.
Over time, each number tends to appear close to its expected probability.
Not exactly.
But approximately.
Sometimes prediction is not about knowing the next result.
It is about understanding the pattern underneath many results together.
Then things become more interesting.
Take two dice.
Now we stop looking at one number and start looking at the sum of both.
At first it still feels random.
But patterns immediately appear.
Some numbers become more common because there are more combinations that create them.
| SUM | COMBINATIONS |
|---|---|
| 2 | 1 + 1 |
| 3 | 1 + 2 · 2 + 1 |
| 4 | 1 + 3 · 2 + 2 · 3 + 1 |
| 7 | 1 + 6 · 2 + 5 · 3 + 4 · 4 + 3 + 5 · 2 + 6 + 1 |
| 12 | 6 + 6 |
2 █ 3 ██ 4 ███ 5 ████ 6 █████ 7 ██████ 8 █████ 9 ████ 10 ███ 11 ██ 12 █
That was probably the first time I noticed how patterns can emerge from randomness.
Later I heard about Isaac Newton, gravity, and the apple story.
An apple falling from a tree is predictable.
The movement is not random.
Objects move following patterns.
After enough observation, the pattern becomes measurable.
And once it becomes measurable, mathematics can describe it.
gravity ≈ 9.81 m/s²
What became interesting to me was that the same idea appeared far beyond the apple itself.
Galaxies.
Planets.
Comets.
Apples.
A grain of sand.
Different objects.
Different scales.
But similar structures repeating underneath movement.
I remember calculating things like this only out of curiosity.
How fast something falls.
How far it moves.
How the numbers evolve.
The time squared part also fascinated me.
The apple is not moving at a constant speed.
It keeps accelerating.
The movement changes continuously.
That idea became important later.
Because things in nature are continuous.
Then college pulled me deeper into this world.
Mathematics.
Differential equations.
At first they looked abstract.
Later I realized they were connected to the same idea that started with the dice:
trying to understand how systems evolve through time.
Fluid dynamics.
Gas.
Electricity.
Waves.
Everything changing continuously.
And once systems become continuous, tiny variations start mattering much more.
A small difference now can slowly become a large difference later.
Then mathematics itself starts expanding.
Imaginary numbers appear.
At first the idea sounds absurd.
But somehow mathematics keeps growing and starts describing real systems surprisingly well.
And the original idea from the dice gained a new meaning.
Now the goal was no longer trying to force the same outcome.
It became understanding how possibilities distribute themselves inside a system.
Quantum mechanics pushed that idea even further.
The equations no longer predict one exact outcome.
They predict a distribution of possible outcomes with different probabilities.
Very similar to the dice.
Some outcomes become much more likely than others.
Not certainty.
Probability distributed across possibilities.
At that point, prediction stopped meaning “knowing exactly what will happen.”
It became understanding the structure behind what could happen.