Probability

  • Whatever the progress of human knowledge, there will always be room for ignorance, hence for chance and probability.

    Emile Borel (1871 - 1956)

  • The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

    Madeline L'Engle (1918-2007)

  • There is no such thing as no chance.

    Henry Ford (1863-1947)

  • Indeed, the laws of chance are just as necessary as the causal laws themselves.

    David J. Bohm (1917 - 1992)

  • Everyone believes in the normal law, the experimenters because they imagine that it is a mathematical theorem, and the mathematicians because they think it is an experimental fact. J.F. Gabriel Lippmann (1845 - 1921)

  • Most accidents in well-designed systems involve two or more events of low probability occurring in the worst possible combination.

    Robert E. Machol (1917 - 1998)

  • Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cock-sure of many things that were not so.

    Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841 - 1935)

  • I bet on a horse at ten-to-one. It didn't come in until half-past five.

    Henny Youngman (1906 - 1998)

  • The true logic of this world is the calculus of probabilities.

    James Clerk Maxwell (1831 - 1879)

  • Normality is a myth; there never has, and never will be, a normal distribution.

    Roy C. Geary (1896 - 1983)

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