Tag Archives: statistics

Another book — Do Dice Play God?

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This book is by Ian Stewart. No, not the 3rd baseman who played for the Rockies and the Cubs about 15 years ago, this Ian Stewart is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick.

Thus, the book has a British focus, and some of his examples are based in the UK, but that is ok.

The subtitle is the Mathematics of Uncertainty. The title is a play on the statement by Einstein, “God does not play dice with the universe.” While god may or may not play dice, do dice ever play god?

Ian says that there are six ages of uncertainty, and he does not cover them in the order that they were found for various reasons. Chaos theory was discussed out of order from when it was found by humans.

  1. The first age of uncertainty involved gods, prophets, fortune tellers, seers, and the like. They could try to predict the future. They could supposedly explain what was going on in the world.
  2. The second age of uncertainty came about during the scientific advances in the 1500-1700s. This is when Newton’s laws defined how gravity works, and it explained how we could predict where the planets will be in the future. If we could predict the movements of planets, would it be possible to predict everything, including human behavior?
  3. The third age came with greater understanding of mathematics and probability. Gamblers, astronomers, mathematicians, and many others would like to know the odds of a future event happening.
  4. The fourth age came with quantum mechanics, and our understanding of never really knowing the location or the momentum of atomic and subatomic particles. These ideas took off in the early 1900s.
  5. The fifth age is when chaos theory was developed.
  6. The sixth age is our current situation. He said that it is “characterized by the realisation that uncertainty comes in many forms, each being comprehensible to some extent.” (page 10.) Mathematics can help us understand the universe a fair bit, but much of the world and the universe is “still horribly uncertain.” For example, we are better at predicting the weather about 5-7 days out, but predicting the weather 10-14 days out is still a crap shoot. Predicting climate change is different matter.

One thing I found fascinating was an oil droplet experiment that made teeny oil droplets behave like both waves and particles. This made Newtonian sized objects behave more like atomic particles. (See pages 233-235.) I had not heard of this experiment since I left physics back in the 1980s. But, it looks like that has been debunked as of 2018. Oh well.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, and I found it interesting. It would probably be best for people who have already had some college-level math or physics.

Read the book — What are the Chances by Barbara Blatchley

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It took me a while to finish the book, but I am glad that I happened upon it (by random chance?) at the local public library. I think I might buy this book for my dad, who has given himself an unofficial middle name of “Lucky”.

Overall, I found the topic fascinating. The author covered the topic from a neurological perspective, since she wanted to figure out what humans (and other animals) think are lucky events or unlucky events. She delved into determining what areas of the brain think about luck, and how that affects our behavior. In general, if humans paid more attention to their environment, they could make better predictions about what will happen in the future. By making better predictions, those people may feel luckier than those who do not pay as much attention to their environment. Thus, some might see luckiness as a learned skill.

A section on page 188 does a good job or providing a summary. I have bulletized some of the text in a paragraph.

  • There is nothing wrong with believing in luck.
  • Believing in and counting on luck can give you a feeling of control that you would otherwise be without.
  • Feeling in control can lead to “better performance, more success, and more favorable outcomes.”
  • It may lead to a stronger belief in luck the next time you are in a jam.
  • “Nothing succeeds like success.”
  • We have a strong tendency to repeat what has worked in the past.

While it is a little bit academic, the average person can just ignore the occasional scholarly references, but some people will enjoy digging deeper into the subject.