The future's not ours to see
pp. 149-157
in: Shyam Wuppuluri, Giancarlo Ghirardi (eds), Space, time and the limits of human understanding, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
So sang Doris Day in 1956, expressing a near-universal belief of humankind. You can't know the future. In this chapter I will trace the different forms of this belief, both pre-scientific and scientific, and discuss some differing kinds of scientific justification for it in physics, culminating in the form of the statement provided by the best physical theory we have found to date, namely quantum mechanics.