Does random have rules?

[Alex K]

The one thing I have been told is "real randomness clumps things together".

Hmmmm.

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I think in principle that should be possible. Consider bohmian quantum mechanics. It is a deterministic interpretation, and even though that doesn't mean that the randomness which occurs can be calculated by a simple formula(it is akin to a chaotic system where arbitrarily small changed in the initial conditions can have huge effects), it nevertheless is only pseudo random because it is uniquely determined by the starting conditions of the hidden variables.

If QM was ultimately deterministic, what would that say about entropy?
IMO, thermodynamics wouldn't work unless randomness is as "real" as energy, mass, etc.
Like in your example in an earlier thread of the 3-body problem and the arrow of time, that was not "real" entropy IMO, because everything was deterministic forward and backward in time.

The concept of entropy was invented in the context of classical mechanics, which was perfectly deterministic.

I think one of the important aspects is the ergodic hypothesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_hypothesis

which allows you to look at the system averaged over time as if you had many different copies of the same system with randomized initial conditions. I have the suspicion that this might open up the possibility to talk about probabilities and such in a deterministic system. But I haven't thought about it in detail, and this is just what I came up spontaneously. If I meet a statistical physics person in the coffee room later I shall ask.