In our class book Rowlands takes a cut at the people who claim that the business of quantum mechanics entering the discussion of causality as most likely getting something wrong with the theory and the transition into the determinism/causality issue. I'm not sure that is the case, being one who has studied exactly that stuff for about a year of my college career in Physical Chemistry and also Modern Physics. I'm no expert, but there are some ideas that seem to undermine determinism and the view that the universe is a big machine or clock (as some have speculated). Quantum Mechanics is the theory (theory is misleading here; it has been proven in experiments) that energy is quantized, that is, discrete. It cannot be separated into smaller parts to an infinitesimal size like a volume knob cuts a signal. It also operates under the fact that light behaves as particles sometimes and waves other times. If you've ever heard the word photon and had no idea, that is the small packets of quantized light that have momentum and have been isolated and tagged (as Randy said in class Monday).

I can't get into all the specifics, but this theory implies a bunch of things about the universe, one being that there is a definite limit to the knowledge that can be obtained about the universe. This is known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states we can never know the position and momentum exactly about anything, we just have good approximations. I think this idea in itself cuts a considerable hole in a truly deterministic world where everything is reducible to cause and effect and the laws of physics, but as for making a case for free will, let me think a bit more on that one.