Friday, March 5, 2010

Probably yes..

"The Conception of chance enters into the very first steps of scientific activity in virtue of the fact that no observation is absolutely correct. I think chance is a more fundamental conception than causality; for whether in a concrete case, a cuase - effect relation holds or not can only be judged by applying the laws of chance to the observation."
MAX Born

In ordinary speech we have large number of words and phrases that attempt to express our opinion of our degrees of confidence. We say on the law of large numbers, we realize now that intimate and significant relation between the probabilities of events and the frequency with which such events occur in long runs of trials. The undeniable existence of such a relation has led mathematician to attempt to develop theories which start out with the frequency of definition of probabilities, rather than with a necessarily artificial " equally probably" definition. But this turns out to be rough going also. You cannot speak accurately of the experimental value of a long run frequency, for in mathematics the phrase long run implies going on forever; and no one has ever, or can ever, perform a actual experiment which goes on forever. Therefore, some dodge must be introduced which in essence asks you to accept the "theoretical" long range frequencies. But if you are going to swallow that, perhaps you would as soon swallow "equally probably events.".

Confusing--- then you are probably on the right track. Is it stimulating then you are confused. Is it assertive then you are probably intelligent. If it sounds outright rubbish - you are probably right.

Cheers.

No comments:

Post a Comment