Quotes About Probability

Not only does God play dice but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.

Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.

According to the Law of Attraction, the physical reality that you experience at present is drawn towards the future probability you desired when it attains more power.

Here's what happens if one repeatedly "applies the model"—at each step adding the word that has the top probability (specified in this code as the "decision" from the model): What happens if one goes on longer? In this ("zero temperature") case what comes out soon gets rather confused and repetitive:

The unknowable lives in a pack of cards after it has been fairly shuffled but before it has been dealt, when all the possibilities are open, and when each possibility matters.

I realized, statistically, the chances of me getting to the WWE and being very successful were very slim. I always hoped it would happen for me.

Realistically, the chance of any book becoming a film is slim.

I like to think of the world as a sort of a casino, except the house doesn't have the advantage. If you're smart, you have an advantage. It behooves you to place a lot of bets.

The quantum theory is based on the idea that there is a probability that all possible events, no matter how fantastic or silly, might occur.

If we can somehow control the probability of certain improbable events, then anything, including faster-than-light travel, and even time travel, is possible. Reaching the distant stars in seconds is highly unlikely, but when one can control quantum probabilities at will, then even the impossible may become commonplace.

To resolve the discrepancy between waves of probability and our commonsense notion of existence, Bohr and Heisenberg assumed that after a measurement is made by an outside observer, the wave function magically "collapses," and the electron falls into a definite state—that is, after looking at the tree, we see that it is truly standing. In other words, the process of observation determines the final state of the electron. Observation is vital to existence.

El contacto con otros universos cuánticos que no estén en coherencia con nosotros parece bastante improbable.

a man has a right to fear dangers that are less than likely to occur.

Cada nueva posibilidad de la existencia, incluso la menos probable, transforma la existencia entera.

Me da la sensación —dijo—, de que en la vida humana la casualidad no se rige por el cálculo de probabilidades. Quiero decir con esto que nos ocurren muchas cosas casuales tan improbables que no podemos justificarlas matemáticamente.

En el caso de un hombre hermoso, el juego de las casualidades eligió el promedio de todas las dimensiones

Siempre existe la posibilidad de que ocurra algo aterrador, y normalmente ocurre.

We need a means for measuring the sizes of different infinite collections of universes. It is this information that we need in order to work out how likely it is that we reside in one type of universe rather than another. Until we find a fundamental dictum for how we should compare infinite collections of universes, we won't be able to foretell mathematically what typical multiverse dwellers-us-should see in experiments and observations. Solving the measure problem is imperative.

So, whereas Bohr argued away by fiat all but one outcome in a measurement, the Many Worlds approach, combined with decoherence, ensures that within each universe it appears as though the other outcomes have vanished. Within each universe, that is, it's as if the probability wave has collapsed. But, compared with the Copenhagen approach, the as if provides for a very different picture of the expanse of reality. In the Many Worlds view, all outcomes, not just one, are realized.

Notice that the value of the entropy and the amount of hidden information are equal. That's no accident. The number of possible heads-tails rearrangements is the number of possible answers to the 1,000 questions-(yes,yes,no,no,yes,...) or (yes,no,yes,yes,no,...) or (no,yes,no,no,no,...), and so on-namely, 2^1000. With entropy defined as the logarithm of the number of such rearrangements-1,000 in this case-entropy is the number of yes-no questions any one such sequence answers.

Es ist ungeheuer viel wahrscheinlicher, dass alles, was wir jetzt im Universum erblicken, aus einer seltenen, aber gelegentlich zu erwartenden Abweichung der totalen Unordnung erwuchs, als dass es sich langsam aus dem noch unwahrscheinlicheren, unglaublich stärker geordneten, erstaunlich niederentropischen Ausgangspunkt entwickelte, den der Urknall voraussetzt.

Entropy can decrease. It's just ridiculously unlikely.

the universe, according to quantum mechanics, participates in a game of chance.

a) The probability wave for a macroscopic object is generally narrowly peaked. (b) The probability wave for a microscopic object, say, a single particle, is typically widely spread.