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The physical world recently came to an end. The cosmic scribe, Sam, had diligently recorded everything that had happened, and the cosmic pattern expert, Pat, on the basis of a thorough examination of Sam's data, got to work on figuring out which (non-trivial) true universal generalisations held. She noticed that a description of very early conditions of the world-conditions Sam recorded when things began to settle down after the Big Bang-plus a subset of her list of regularities were sufficient to entail all subsequent items on Sam's list. Being a Humean about laws, Pat concluded that she had thereby discovered what the laws of the physical world were. She also concluded that the world was deterministic. (She was most pleased with this discovery, being a naturally neat and tidy person.) Because she was a Humean about laws, Pat went on to reflect that the world need not have turned out that way. In her view, Sam's list might have started out just as it did, but then begun to diverge from the actual list after a day, a week, or a million years in such a way as eventually to show the world to be non-deterministicor to have a different collection of deterministic laws. (Pat had not been kicking her heels during the long wait for the end of the world: she had been busy practising her art. She would often get Sam to make up hypothetical lists and see what cosmic patterns she could discern in them; more often than not, the results were displeasingly untidy.

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