Start with the domino. Push the first one and the rest fall in an order you could, in principle, predict if you knew the exact position, weight, and spacing of every tile. This is the picture that determinism offers us for the universe itself. Pierre Simon Laplace put it plainly two centuries ago: an intelligence that knew the precise state of every particle in existence, along with the laws governing them, could calculate the entire future and the entire past in a single equ