If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Each move is dictated by the previous one – that is the meaning of order. Guil says something very important, so important that we're going to include the whole quote right here: GUIL: Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are … condemned. After speaking with Hamlet, Ros and Guil try to figure out what is going on. From the very start of the play, the coin focuses in on major issues: are our lives controlled by chance or by fate? If they're controlled by fate, is there any way of knowing what that fate is? Either way, is there any hope of having free will? This becomes very explicit in Act Two.
One of the more creative ideas he has is "Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of a man spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for the sins of an unremembered past" (6.56). One way to think about it: what if God sent you a message in Morse code and you didn't know Morse code? Guil tries to consider a bunch of different explanations for what is going on. Usually in books, getting "a sign from above" is a good thing, so why is Guil so scared? The reason is that this sign is ambiguous. It's like he is getting a sign from above, like he is seeing the Virgin Mary in the flesh. All of a sudden, it seems that tossing a coin is no longer about chance, but about fate. In other words, the chances are very, very small. The chances of this happening are one in 2 to the 100th power. In the first scene of the play, the coin comes down heads over one hundred times in a row. It is one of the first things that comes to mind when we talk about 'chance': heads I win, tails you lose. A coin toss is a classic example in classes on probability. When you throw up that quarter, there are many more questions than whether or not it will come down heads or tails. Yet, in Stoppard's play, a coin toss becomes an immensely complicated thing. As bets go, betting on the flip of a coin is pretty straightforward. It can either come up heads or it can come up tails.
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