Quotes About Probability

I could probably sit here in my office and do nothing, and the criminal would find his way to me. That's how strong the probabilities are in my favor.

History proves that 85 percent of all options expire without being exercised.

Then you can go home to the puppeteer worlds and tell them that mucking with human breeding habits is a chancy business. Tell them that enough Teela Browns could make a hash of all the laws of probability. Even basic physics is nothing more than probability at the atomic level. Tell them the universe is too complicated a toy for a sensibly cautious being to play with.

Danger doesn't exist for Teela Brown

There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.

I have never found 'luck' a dependable companion

Death and life are both simply the hazards of a chance which cannot be averted

Most sane human beings' chances of being alive in a thousand years' time are a hundred times higher than their chances of being sincerely happy for at least ten consecutive days.

When I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my pistol.

All knowledge degenerates into probability.

In flying, the probability of survival is inversely proportional to the angle of arrival.

As a scientist, I don't believe anything. Science shouldn't use the word belief. There are things more likely and less likely. Science can say nothing with absolute certainty.

I do not believe anything very certainly, but everything very probably.

We live in the most probable of all possible worlds.

When asked what he meant by a miracle: Oh, anything with a probability of less than 20%.

Not only that God does play dice, but that He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen.

Entropy theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement.

You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10-12 to 1.

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.

What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

The discontinuous 'reduction of the wave packets' which cannot be derived from Schroedinger's equation is ... a consequence of the transition from the possible to the actual.

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.