Quotes About Probability

chance" is not a cause. Chance is a word that we use to describe mathematical possibilities. It has no power of its own. Chance is nothing. It's what rocks dream about.

Kaufman calculated the risks of his situation: the mathematics of panic.

Es ist nicht bewiesen, aber es ist wahrscheinlich und wenn es wahrscheinlich ist, dann war es wahrscheinlich so.

How many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all?

A wonderful point in favor of some kind of hereafter is this: When the mind rejects as childishly absurd a paradise with musical angels or abstract colonnades with Horace and Milton in togas conversing and walking together through the eternal twilight, or the protracted voluptas of the orient or any other eternity -- such as the one with devils and porcupines -- we forget that if we could have imagined life before living it would have seemed more improbable than all our hereafters

There are many probability axes in Allah's creation. Space, time and probability all have an axis on which it is possible to move. This is why they often refer to the greatest Sufi saints and Sheikhs as Qutubs, Poles, or Axial Centralities of the Universe.

Now, if the theist could prove that out of a number of equally possible lines of development living beings show one fixed form, and that against the compulsion of environmental forces, he would do something to prove the probability of some sort of guidance.

It is remarkable that what we call the world, which is so very credulous in what professes to be true, is most incredulous in what professes to be imaginary; and that, while, every day in real life, it will allow in one man no blemishes, and in another no virtues, it will seldom admit a very strongly-marked character, either good or bad, in a fictitious narrative, to be within the limits of probability.

The universe always wagers — life is risk.

A million million spermatozoa, All of them alive: Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah Dare hope to survive. And among that billion minus one Might have chanced to be Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne; But the One was Me.

Murphy's Law doesn't mean bad stuff will happen," he explained gently, really wanting her to understand. "It means 'whatever can happen… will happen.' And that sounded just fine to us.

As for those forwards who remain on the ice for too long, we'll pass the mic to venerable blogger Tyler Dellow: "Being on the ice after a minute is sort of like being in a bar after 1:00 am—there's no guarantee that something bad will happen, it's possible that something good will happen, but the odds are slanted heavily in favor of something bad.

According to Bohr and Heisenberg, the universe exists as an infinite number of overlapping possibilities.

the more energy a probability requires, the more unstable it really is.

Experience has always shown, and reason shows, that affairs which depend on many seldom succeed.

Storylines from fiction always seem inherently improbable to occur in real life, yet when we read them we are happy to suspend our disbelief, which may simply suggest that in our everyday lives we have an irrational craving for certainty and probability.

It's important to acknowledge the role of chance in health.

A bit, fundamentally, is always a coin toss.

Thought interferes with the probability of events, and, in the long run therefore, with entropy. —David L. Watson (1930)

Alan Turing once whimsically proposed a number N, defined as "the odds against a piece of chalk leaping across the room and writing a line of Shakespeare on the board."?

The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled.

The odds against an adoptee ending up as the child of the President of the United States are staggering. But then, so are the odds against a movie star becoming president.

God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers.

We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don't know the probability that a planet develops life.