[thinkski]

From the article: “To get a TRULY random number sequence, you'd need to rely upon some truly random phenomenon, like the decay of a radioactive isotope.”

How is the true randomness of a physical phenomenon proved? Perhaps naively, I imagine that as an arithmetic-based software RNG is deterministic, so is a physical RNG, as otherwise the underlying physical process would be governed by no physical principals, no? Does random in this case not necessarily mean non-deterministic, but rather no statistically visible correlations?

[dchest]

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/340530/how-do-we...

[H8crilA]

Quantum mechanics, and the specific proof is the subject of a recent Nobel prize (practical demonstration of a violation of a Bell's inequality). Shame that Bell himself didn't live long enough to get the prize too.

In fact everything you observe is truly random, it's just that for most things the probabilities are very boring, at least as far as you can practically tell.