I'm going to present arguments... to strongly support... that we do... have free will, but not... to prove it at the deductive level. - John Horton Conway

The classical... problem is... how densely a large number of identical spheres ([e.g.,] ball bearings...) can be packed together. ...[C]onsider an aircraft hangar... [A]bout one quarter of the space will not be used... One... arrangement... the face-centered cubic (or fcc) lattice... spheres occupy <math>\pi / \sqrt{18} = .7405...</math> of the total space.... the lattice packing has density <math>.7405...</math> . [H]pwever, there are partial packings that are denser than the face-centered cubic... over larger regions...

[L]ots of philosophical discussions about free will are concerned with the question of assigning moral responsibility. ...If the judge is a determinist, I might argue it was all determined. I just had to do it. I'm not responsible. ...We're not concerned with assigning moral responsibility... I want you to think of free whim...

In this chapter we discuss the problem of packing spheres in and of packing points on the surface of a sphere. The problem is an important special case of the latter, and asks how many spheres can just touch another sphere of the same size.