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“In countless ways, our lives seem, for good or ill, ours to manage; in countless other ways, including those related to many of the things that matter most, they feel maddeningly out of our hands. The only thing we know for certain is that, if the universe really is deterministic, its gears or gods are hidden from us. We are not like Laplace’s demon, possessing perfect knowledge of the present state of every atom in existence and therefore able to see how all subsequent events will unfold. For that matter, even if we did possess such knowledge, it might not make a difference. Plenty of contemporary physicists think that the universe is indeterminate—that even an intellect gigantic enough to comprehend all the causes in the cosmos would not be able to correctly infer the effects and thereby foretell the future.

"Either way, suspense still reigns supreme. As long as the future remains opaque, it will also remain frightening and exhilarating, the repository of our greatest fears and wildest dreams. This is perhaps the most important way that real-life suspense differs from the fictional kind: in books and movies, we do not necessarily care if the outcome for which we have been waiting is good or bad—our primary concern is that it resolves the feeling of suspense in a satisfying way. But in life we care about those outcomes desperately. We want our fears to prove unfounded and our dreams to come true; we want to be spared life’s many possible devastations and gratified by its revelations and resolutions. This is, perhaps, the tenderest and most hopeful definition of suspense: it is the passionate wish, in the face of omnipresent doubts and dangers, that all will be well in the future.”

— Kathryn Schulz, “Annals of Inquiry: Wait for It,” The New Yorker