Ellis.
I know the feeling, I'm not a scientist, either.
"The discussion seemed to be heading in that direction I thought. ie basically that the universe is a determinate universe because of the operation of the natural laws of physics and therefore random acts are impossible."
Just the opposite. The discussion was nothing more than an academic exercise. It wound up with the foregone conclusion: as long quantum theory holds true, i.e., that, at the quantum level truly random events do occur, then the logical conclusion is that the universe cannot be determinate. This was what Einstein found difficult to swallow, prompting him to say "God does not play dice with the universe".
Chaos is an interesting new science (mid-twentieth cent.) which was launched mainly by the research of a meteorologist feeding simulated weather data into a computer. He found that a minute change in the initial data eventually had a radical effect on the simulation results. Although I've read quite a bit about it, I don't pretend to understand at all well - it's a maths based science steeped if fractal mathematics, and specialist at that! Some scientists still argue about its veracity, but it's making headway in many sciences. It has, so I hear, even lead to the production of an improved heart pacemaker.
Chaos, in 'Chaos Theory', is not the same as the 'chaos' of common usage. In a 'chaotic system', all states of the system, at any point on the time line, are determinate but, because of the complexity involved, they cannot be predicted.
I expect you?re thinking, "How can anything be predicted if the theory quantum mechanics is true?". I think the answer is that at the macro level, e.g., potting the black ball, quantum events cancel out. Oops! Is this going to start another debate!
