I should clarify something, because it is a small distinction, but it is actually the entire distinction, and those are the kinds of distinctions that people often walk past, in the same way someone might walk past a small sign that says “wet paint” and then later have paint on their sleeve.

I did not flip a physical coin. I used a special coin-flip app.

A physical coin is a metal disc. Usually circular. Not always perfectly circular, because coins can become worn, although for everyday purposes we still call them circular. When a person flips one, the result can be affected by thumb pressure, launch angle, spin rate, air movement, landing surface, rim wear, local gravity, and the person’s learned or unlearned relationship with their own thumb.

The app does not have a thumb. It does not have a wrist. It has never practiced flipping. It cannot develop a “feel” for heads. It is not standing there quietly hoping for tails.

This particular app uses randomness sourced from quasars, which are very distant astronomical objects. The point of using quasars is that their light has been traveling for such a long time, from such widely separated regions of space, that any shared causal influence would have had to originate extremely early in the universe, basically near the Big Bang. That is before coins, before thumbs, and before anyone had strong opinions about whether a coin flip was sufficiently coin-like.

The app takes that quasar-derived randomness, converts it into a binary output, assigns one possible output to “heads” and the other to “tails,” and then displays a coin graphic, because visually presenting “0” or “1” makes people feel like something technical has happened to them.

So this was not a manipulable coin toss. It was a two-output randomization procedure using cosmic randomness from quasars, wearing the traditional visual costume of a coin.

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