Emergence and please stop telling god what to do with his dice!

A fascinating article in Forbes entitled Proof found of God Playing Dice or something to that effect prompted a few questions on my Facebook group, Miskatonic University.

Both emergence and physics are topics I haven't studied formally, so my understanding is rudimentary at best. To get technical, I'm an information scientist, and regrettably not information science in the information theory Claude Shannon sense, but information science in the ah kahn lark to digitise your library sense. If that makes sense. Add some pinches and punches of salt:

I understand by emergence that a few basic rules govern a system deterministically, but then the system develops properties that aren't apparent from the individual rules. Like the Boids algorithm, developed to get flocking/swarming behaviour for special effects. The old Tim Burton Batman movies feature Boids, with bats scattering all over the place according to the algorithm. Worth reading up, but to me, emergence is a bit of a curiosity stopper. Can't explain it from the basics? Must be emergent behaviour. It's correct for some systems of behaviour, but it's not entirely correct for any inexplicable phenomena, which means it has that dangerous potential if it stops further scrutiny.

Back to Boids! Each Boid is programmed with three basic rules: 

1. follow the leader
2. do not crash into other birds
3. catch up to the other birds when it gets too far behind 

You can make it almost deterministic in the sense of giving the leader bird a path to fly, as they do with special effects in movies, or you can just leave it and see the birds flocking with the leader getting a path that hasn't been pre-determined. The flock just swarms. Looks much the same on a small scale like a PC screen, doubt it would get them migrating though.

In the case of nuclear fusion, it seems like emergence to get a Newtonian pool table world from the god playing dice/spooky action at a distance quantum mechanics world. But quantum mechanics relies on rules that are stochastic/probabilistic, so there's a bit of a paradox in that a world of clockwork order emerges from a smaller world of coin flipping randomness.

In the sense of a completely deterministic world, one particle getting too close to another would mean that they bounce further from each other without the nuclear fusion happening. This is thanks to Coulomb forces, I think. But thanks to some randomness, probably due to the structure of atoms, they get to tinker with each others's quantum objects (I'm not sure what this is, I read it in the Forbes article - it probably just refers to really tiny stuff that all bigger stuff is made of). The Coulomb forces don't always cause them to bounce away, so they get crunched too close together and then the quantum objects start smashing together. You just need a tiny percentage of the overall sun to have quantum bits smashing together, and then you'd get nuclear fusion.

The most intuitive explanation for this sort of thing I've found is in Allen Downy's book, Think Complexity. He has a whole range of Think X books, so he teaches you Statistics and Python in a similar fashion with books called Think Statistics and.. well you get the idea. For emergent behaviour, the Think Complexity book is easier to understand the sort of thing Stephen Wolfram has been going on about while taking bowel movement selfies, in a manner of speaking.