This is an article about whether the deterministic picture of the world is compatible with quantum mechanics, where the fundamental random comes from, how this should affect our perception of the world, and whether it is possible (hypothetically) to accurately model the future, at least in terms of probabilities (spoiler: probably , not).
If the question of why quantum mech is practically incompatible with determinism seems too simple to you, you can immediately skip to the last section of the article - about the fact that there are systems that cannot be described even probabilistically.
What is determinism and how it relates to predicting the future and free will
Do all phenomena have a cause in the past? Is our current state determined by the state of the previous moment? If your answer is yes, then you are a determinist.
Determinism directly follows from classical physics, according to which, knowing the state of the system at the initial moment of time, one can unambiguously predict its state at the next moment - for this one needs to know only the initial conditions and the laws of physics.
A simple example: take a mathematical pendulum. If we know in what position he was at some moment and we know his speed, and we also know all the forces that act on him (gravity, thread tension, air resistance), then we can write Newton's second law and get the differential equation with known initial conditions. Having solved it, we will find the position of the pendulum at any moment in time. The same is true not only for the pendulum, but for any physical system (not necessarily purely mechanical).
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By the way, if the world is non-deterministic, what about the question of free will? Does this mean that we have the ability to make free choices? Unfortunately, things are not so easy again. The fact is that quantum effects probably do not affect our brain in any way, which means that it is described by classical physics, which is quite deterministic to itself. Of course, quantum fluctuations can affect us, but they most likely only play the role of noise introduced into measurements and have nothing to do with the decision-making process. But this is a topic that deserves a separate article.