Determinism

Contrary to what you may have heard, determinism does not conflict with current physics. Quantum mechanics and Einstein’s two theories of relativity are the pillars of current physics. Deterministic theories exist that predict what quantum mechanics predicts while respecting Einstein’s theories just as well, on the whole, as quantum mechanics does.

One such deterministic theory is Bohmian mechanics, named for the physicist David Bohm. The details would be impossible to spell out in a blog post even if I understood them all. But I can recommend two sources, one of which is free online: physicist Sheldon Goldstein’s entry “Bohmian Mechanics” in the peer-reviewed Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The other is the article “What Bell Did,” published by philosopher Tim Maudlin in the Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical, vol. 47 (2014), which you’ll need to get via an academic library.

Misinformed people say that the experimental violations of Bell’s Theorem rule out deterministic physics. Bell himself knew better: what they rule out is physics that’s both deterministic and local. Bohmian mechanics survives because it’s nonlocal, but (as Bell showed) so is quantum mechanics itself.