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- This week, in the journal Nature, a collaboration of more than a hundred quantum physicists, distributed across twelve laboratories in eleven countries on five continents, turned Freeman’s formulation on its head. With the help of high-powered lasers, superconducting magnets, and state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithms, they concluded that “if human will is free, there are physical events . . . that are intrinsically random, that is, impossible to predict.” The group dubbed their experiment the Big Bell Test, after the renowned twentieth-century physicist John S. Bell.