Originally posted by: Enigmatic_Paragon
In the past, this was accepted scientific belief - just look up Determinism. It was believed that everything was predetermined, and there was no such thing as chance. This line of thinking follows from the logic that if you know the speed and velocity of say a bowling ball, you could calculate whether it will hit another bowling ball, and where that ball will go etc etc. So if you knew everything, you could rpedict their interactions as it would follow a logical sequence. Hence, according to that line of thing, there is no free will, no choice, no chance. Every thought we have, every choice we make, every event that happens is a result of previous physical interactions between countless atoms, and would have happened come hell or high water.
However with the advent of Quantum Mechanics, the accepted belief is that there is such a thing as chance, and that it is impossible for everything to be predetermined. This is because you cant know all the properties of anything at any one time. It is theoretically possible to know the speed and direction of an atom at time x, but if you know the speed and velocity it is thought to be impossible to know the exact location of it at the same time. On the flip side, if you know the exact location of an atom at time x, it is impossible to know the speed/velocity. So yeah, at least according to current theory, you cant just calculate everything.