God is not a betting man

That is a paraphrase of Albert Einstein, the 20th century thinker who best exemplified thinking about the structure of the universe. He expressed public disagreement with theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, considering phenomena in very small places, such as atoms or even subatomic particles. Such particles may behave very differently from phenomena with macroscopic scales. A famous example dealt with electrons trapped in a potential valley because they lack sufficient energy to get up the hill. Dirac and others postulated that such electrons have a non-zero probability of tunneling their way out. Einstein famously stated he did not believe God would "play dice games" . Yet, creative physicists and engineers were led to invent a tunnel diode microwave generator with electrons using the tunneling effect to escape the potential valley. Your writer remembers Hewlett Packard, (and later the part split off from the company as Agilent) selling instruments containing tunnel diodes. Perhaps one is unable to answer the existential question, "Do electrons actually tunnel their way out of a potential valley?", but real devices act as though they do. Certainly, although Einstein deserves much credit for his theories of general and special relativity, one can wish he had not made dogmatic assertions which are not borne out by physics experiments.