Regardless of what stock market analysts, political pollsters and astrologers might say, we can’t predict the future. In fact, we can’t even predict the past. So much for the work of Pierre-Simon Laplace, the French mathematician, philosopher and king of determinism. In 1814, LaPlace declared that if it were possible to know the velocity and position of every particle in the universe at one particular moment — and all the forces that were acting on them — “for such an intellect nothing would be