Quotes About Probability

The probability wave] meant a tendency for something. It was a quantitative version of the old concept of potentia in Aristoelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.

Nada hay en este mundo, Betteredge, que se aparezca como una cosa probable, si no logramos vincularla con nuestra engañosa experiencia, y sólo creemos en lo novelesco cuando se halla estampado en letras de molde.

It is not merely probable, it is certain that we shall never find a straight line that is not the shortest distance between two points.

They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.

So vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.

making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact

Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.

If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err.

For every action, there's an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers - and one comes true.

Fortune-telling was quantum betting, a competitive scrying of variably likely outcomes.

Which of these animals is more likely to kill you? A SHARK                                    A DEER           ANSWER: The deer is more likely to kill you. In fact, it's 300 times more likely to kill you (via a collision with your car).

There are a little more than 50 million people in England, and around 50 deaths each day via accidental causes (slipping in the tub; being swept away in a flooding river; falling from a ladder). The daily risk of dying there in an accident is roughly 1 in a million. Your risk of dying unexpectedly in England on any given day is the same as your odds of having to guess which date someone is thinking of between 500 BC and August 1, 2200.

Odds of winning Powerball: 1 in 292,201,338 Imagine having to guess which second of a day someone is thinking of—any date, hour, minute, and second from the time they're born to the time they turn 9. If you match, you win the lottery prize. The jackpot is yours. All you have to do is think of the resident of the United States whose name is written down over there on that folded piece of paper. (Hint: they are older than the age of 10.)

A study showed that when doctors reckoned themselves "completely certain" about a diagnosis, they were wrong 40% of the time. When a group of students made estimates that they believed had only a 1% chance of being wrong, they were actually wrong 27% of the time.

Let us consider an even simpler example of a random variable, the number obtained when you throw just one die. (Pedantic note : this is the singular of the word whose plural is dice. Two dice, one die. Like two mice, one mie.)(Well, two mice, one mouse. Like two hice, one house. Peculiar language, English.)

The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability. —MARQUIS DE LAPLACE A

The final story of randomness—utter chaos—has not yet been told to us by the mathematicians. It seems remarkable that something so fundamental for probability theory has not been defined and even more remarkable that we can go so far in mathematics lacking a definition. By simply assuming randomness exists, mathematicians assign elementary probabilities to events, and that is their starting point. But they have not captured chaos and looked it in the eye.

Randomness It is remarkable that a science which began with the consideration of games of chance should have become the most important object of human knowledge. —MARQUIS DE LAPLACE A

And yet it has been estimated that in the developed world, 75 per cent of our lifetime medical costs are incurred in the last six months of our lives. This is the price of hope, hope which, by the laws of probability, is so often unrealistic. And thus we often end up inflicting both great suffering on ourselves and unsustainable expense on society.

Which of the two possibilities corresponds to reality is simply unknown until a definite measurement is made, at which point the quantum state instantaneously changes to reflect the result of that measurement.

Newton's equations of absolute exactitude and certainty ("classical determinism") were replaced by Schrodinger's new equations and Heisenberg's mathematics of fuzziness, indeterminacy, and probability.

He saw that, ultimately, only possibilities for events and their probabilities of occurring, with intrinsic uncertainties, exist. This was the emerging new reality of quantum physics.

La peggiore notizia – se è pubblicata su un giornale – con ogni probabilità non è capitata a chi legge, e offre un collegamento di rassicurante normalità con la vita quotidiana.

probability is the very guide of life