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"God doesn't play dice."

I'm sure the reader has heard this famous saying from Einstein in a 1926 letter to fellow physicist Max Born. Perhaps not so clear to most people is what God and what dice Einstein was referring to. His worries reflect a deep concern about how far our explanations of Nature can go. They speak to the heart of what science is, an issue that remains contentious to this day.

Einstein was referring to quantum physics, the physics that describes the behavior of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles — like electrons and the Higgs boson. The "dice" relate to probabilities, the fact that in the quantum world the cozy determinism of our classical worldview goes down the drain.

In our everyday life objects follow well-behaved histories from point A to point B. In the realm of the very small this determinism fails completely. We can, at most, compute probabilities that a particle will be at this or that point in space (within the accuracy of the measuring device). Even more bizarre, before we detect a particle we can't even tell if it exists. All we have is potentiality.

In an extreme interpretation, we can say that the act of detection "creates" the particle. But if that's the case, what about bigger objects? Aren't they made of atoms, which are quantum objects? Does a mountain only exist when we look at it? Surely, that's kind of ridiculous. Mount Everest is there whether we look at it or not. But how can you tell? Do we know that Mount Everest is out there when we are not looking, or do we infer that from common sense?

To Einstein, this loss of predictive determinism couldn't be the last word in our description of Nature. Another theory, deeper and broader, should be able to explain the paradoxes of the quantum world. Was he right?

A lot has happened in eight decades. Experiments have tried again and again to find flaws in traditional quantum mechanics, perhaps opening a window into an alternative theory. All to no avail: it really looks as if quantum mechanics is here to stay. Nature is inherently uncertain and we have to come to terms with it.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, stating that we can't know both position and velocity of a particle with arbitrary accuracy, is more than an obstacle to knowledge; it's the way Nature operates. God does seem to play dice, and the tremendous successes of quantum physics are a testament to our ability to make sense of a very bizarre state of affairs.

Einstein's sentence in his letter to Born is actually different from the snippet above:

Quantum mechanics demands serious attention. But an inner voice tells me that this is not the true Jacob. The theory accomplishes a lot, but it does not bring us closer to the secrets of the Old One. In any case, I am convinced that He does not play dice.

The National Transportation Safety Board wants to know how a problem with the design of batteries that led to a fire aboard a Boeing's 787 'Dreamliner' slipped through the extensive certification process for the new passenger aircraft.

In the first day of a public hearing on Tuesday, the NTSB questioned officials from Boeing, the Federal Aviation Administration, Japanese battery maker GS Yuasa Corp. and electrical system maker Thales of France. The safety agency wants to find out what was known about overheating problems with lithium-ion batteries prior to two failures aboard 787s in January, one of which led to a fire on the ground that took an hour to put out.

"We are here to understand why the 787 experienced unexpected battery failures following a design program led by one of the world's leading manufacturers and a certification process that is well respected throughout the international aviation community," NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman said during the first of two days of hearings.

"We are looking for lessons learned, not just for the design and certification of the failed battery but also for knowledge that can be applied to emerging technologies going forward," she said.

As The Los Angeles Times reports:

"Much of the testing was left to Boeing and its battery suppliers. They determined that the likelihood of smoke or fire from a 787 battery would occur fewer than once in every 10 million flight hours. But there already have been two crucial battery events on the 787 fleet with fewer than 52,000 flight hours."

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

A 95-year-old woman donated nine letters that J.D. Salinger wrote her in the early 1940s to the Morgan Library & Museum. One of the letters, obtained by The New York Times, reads, "Let's have no more talk of my New Yorker piece. God and [New Yorker founder] Harold Ross alone know what that bunch of pixies on the staff are doing with my poor script." Others are flirtatious — after asking her to send him a picture, Salinger wrote, "Sneaky girl. You're pretty."

Somehow, even a guided tour of George Saunders' desktop icons is interesting and charming. For The Guardian, Ben Johncock interviews the Tenth of December author about technology: "Through some demonic cause-and-effect, our technology is exactly situated to exploit the crappier angles of our nature: gossip, self-promotion, snarky curiosity."

John Simpson, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, plans to retire in October, having overseen the addition of some "60,000 new words and meanings," according to Publisher's Lunch. Simpson told Time magazine that "Each word is a different sort of poem. The smaller entries are like Shakespearean sonnets — the larger ones, more like Joyce's Ulysses." Michael Proffitt, the editorial project director, will take over as chief editor.

The New York Times was heavily criticized for running two reviews of Nathaniel Rich's book Odds Against Tomorrow, in addition to a travel essay by the author and a profile of him and his brother in the month of January. Rich happens to be the son of former Times chief theater critic and op-ed columnist Frank Rich. Margaret Sullivan, the Times' Public Editor, wrote in a post that the "hat trick" was accidental. (Charges of partiality at the paper might also be countered by the biting review of Times journalist Brian Stelter's book on morning television, Top of the Morning: "Brian Stelter's book on the nefarious network morning show wars ends up being like a breakfast made not quite to order.")

Duly noted, although as a woman of only middling bravery, I myself was not scared by Maya's story, mostly because I didn't believe a word of it. It's not that the sequence of events isn't reasonable for a girl on a downward spiral — spurred by the death from cancer of her beloved grandfather — but that the voice is so implausible. The hyper-articulate present-tense Maya who is prone to old-fashioned language (she notes the "lapidary" phrasing of her scuzzy Vegas boss) is completely at odds with the passive victim in the flashbacks. Maya may be a lively character, but she never feels remotely real.

Daniel, who conveniently happens to have just finished a psychiatric residency in Seattle, tells her she has abandonment issues (right before he licks her "like candy"). He might not have needed a degree to come up with this theory; when Maya was just a few days old, her mother, a Danish air hostess, dropped Maya off with Nini and Popo, and renounced her parental rights. Maya's father, a pilot, visited regularly but mostly left the parenting to his saintly stepfather and firebrand mother. Nini, the book's most vivid character, is somewhat distracted by her activism among the Berkeley do-gooders, but Popo, a dreamy African-American astronomer who oozes Morgan Freeman-style fabulousness from every pore, was always there for Maya, until his untimely demise.

In terms of the outrageous and/or harrowing circumstances she puts her heroine in, Allende could almost be borrowing from the wild adventures on drug-themed cable series like Breaking Bad or Weeds, but without the sense of irony. Maya's recovery from drug addict to chatty, affectionate teen may be just another magical-realist miracle for the famed author of The House of the Spirits. Some of the character's incongruity likely stems from the fact that this is the first time Allende has tried writing in a youthful, contemporary voice.

“ Maya may be a lively character, but she never feels remotely real.