1. Your numbers start in empty space

Take a box. Pump out the air, seal it, make it perfectly dark. The space inside is now as empty as anything can be — and it still jiggles. Zoom in anywhere and you'd see it: tiny, restless, never stopping. Your lottery numbers are made by measuring those jiggles.

2. The next jiggle is written nowhere

A coin flip only looks random. Film the spin closely enough and you could call it before it lands. The jiggles are different. Nothing anywhere in the universe decides the next jiggle in advance. There is no hidden machinery — careful experiments have ruled that out. The next jiggle simply has not happened yet. For a lottery, that is exactly what you want.

3. The catch: a detector would read nothing

So measure the jiggles — but there is a catch. They are far, far too faint. A detector can see only one thing: brightness. Something this faint has essentially no brightness at all. Point any detector at the jiggling emptiness and it reads the same thing: nothing.

4. The fix: a laser and a half-silvered mirror

Here is the fix, running in a real lab at the Australian National University. A bright, steady laser shines into a half-silvered mirror. The mirror's other opening faces the sealed, jiggling emptiness. The laser and the jiggles blend. The blend comes out of both exits, landing on two detectors: D1 and D2.

5. A tiny jiggle moves brightness a lot

Watch one detector. Brightness works like the area of a square. The light's strength is the side; brightness is the area. Pretend numbers: the laser alone has strength 10, so its brightness is 100 — a 10 by 10 square of tiles. One jiggle nudges the strength to 11. Brightness jumps to 121. The extra 21 tiles are two strips of ten plus one corner tile: about twice the laser's strength. The jiggle itself is still tiny. But riding the big laser, its effect is now big enough to read.

6. Two detectors, one subtraction

There are two detectors for a reason. The laser shows up the same in both readings, even its own wobbles. The jiggles show up flipped: what they add to one reading, they take away from the other. So subtract one reading from the other. Everything the laser adds cancels perfectly, wobbles and all. What is left swings above and below zero — no brightness can ever do that. It is a big, readable copy of the jiggles themselves.

7. From wave to digits

The big copy from the last step is the wave below. Again and again, a computer snapshots the wave's height. Each snapshot is rounded to the nearest of 65,536 levels — one level for every possible string of sixteen 0s and 1s. The strip under the wave shows those strings arriving. An instant before each snapshot, that height is not decided anywhere. An instant after, it is one definite string, forever. The "Many Worlds" section further down the page talks about a measurement coming out differently in each world. These snapshots are that measurement.

Illustration only — generate a ticket and this wave is rebuilt from the real measurements behind it.

8. Cutting your ticket

Above: an example measurement — sixteen 0s and 1s, and the plain number they spell. Your balls are cut from that stream of digits, a few digits at a time: just enough to cover the game's highest ball. A read that does not fit the game, or repeats a ball you already have, is thrown away, and we read on. Throwing one away favors nothing — it is a blind re-roll. Generate a ticket to see the real measurements, and every cut, below this panel.