"Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal." (Leonard Mlodinow, "The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", 2008)
"Random events often come like the raisins in a box of cereal
- in groups, streaks, and clusters. And although Fortune is fair in
potentialities, she is not fair in outcomes."
"The key to understanding randomness and all of mathematics is not being able to intuit the answer to every problem immediately but merely having the tools to figure out the answer." (Leonard Mlodinow, "The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", 2008)
"The law of small numbers is not really a law. It is a sarcastic name describing the misguided attempt to apply the law of large numbers when the numbers aren't large." (Leonard Mlodinow, "The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", 2008)
"The outline of our lives, like the candles flame, is continuously coaxed in new directions by a variety of random events that, along with our responses to them, determine our fate." (Leonard Mlodinow, "The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", 2008)
"The theory of randomness is fundamentally a codification of common sense. But it is also a field of subtlety, a field in which great experts have been famously wrong and expert gamblers infamously correct. What it takes to understand randomness and overcome our misconceptions is both experience and a lot of careful thinking." (Leonard Mlodinow, "The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", 2008)
"We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out picture is clear and accurate. But is it?" (Leonard Mlodinow, "The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", 2008)
"Why is the human need to be in control relevant to a discussion of random patterns? Because if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events." (Leonard Mlodinow, "The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", 2008)
"A model is a good model if it:1. Is elegant 2. Contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements 3. Agrees with and explains all existing observations 4. Makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out." (Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow, "The Grand Design", 2010)
"With each theory or model, our concepts of reality and of the fundamental constituents of the universe have changed." (Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow, "The Grand Design", 2010)
"Our inner weighing of evidence is not a careful mathematical calculation resulting in a probabilistic estimate of truth, but more like a whirlpool blending of the objective and the personal. The result is a set of beliefs - both conscious and unconscious - that guide us in interpreting all the events of our lives." (Leonard Mlodinow, "War of the Worldviews: Where Science and Spirituality Meet - and Do Not", 2011)
"Science has revealed a universe that is vast, ancient, violent, strange, and beautiful, a universe of almost infinite variety and possibility one in which time can end in a black hole, and conscious beings can evolve from a soup of minerals." (Leonard Mlodinow, "War of the Worldviews: Where Science and Spirituality Meet - and Do Not", 2011)
"The law of small numbers is not really a law. It is a sarcastic name describing the misguided attempt to apply the law of large numbers when the numbers aren't large." (Leonard Mlodinow, "The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", 2008)
"The outline of our lives, like the candles flame, is continuously coaxed in new directions by a variety of random events that, along with our responses to them, determine our fate." (Leonard Mlodinow, "The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", 2008)
"The theory of randomness is fundamentally a codification of common sense. But it is also a field of subtlety, a field in which great experts have been famously wrong and expert gamblers infamously correct. What it takes to understand randomness and overcome our misconceptions is both experience and a lot of careful thinking." (Leonard Mlodinow, "The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", 2008)
"We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out picture is clear and accurate. But is it?" (Leonard Mlodinow, "The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", 2008)
"Why is the human need to be in control relevant to a discussion of random patterns? Because if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events." (Leonard Mlodinow, "The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", 2008)
"A model is a good model if it:1. Is elegant 2. Contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements 3. Agrees with and explains all existing observations 4. Makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out." (Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow, "The Grand Design", 2010)
"With each theory or model, our concepts of reality and of the fundamental constituents of the universe have changed." (Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow, "The Grand Design", 2010)
"Our inner weighing of evidence is not a careful mathematical calculation resulting in a probabilistic estimate of truth, but more like a whirlpool blending of the objective and the personal. The result is a set of beliefs - both conscious and unconscious - that guide us in interpreting all the events of our lives." (Leonard Mlodinow, "War of the Worldviews: Where Science and Spirituality Meet - and Do Not", 2011)
"Science has revealed a universe that is vast, ancient, violent, strange, and beautiful, a universe of almost infinite variety and possibility one in which time can end in a black hole, and conscious beings can evolve from a soup of minerals." (Leonard Mlodinow, "War of the Worldviews: Where Science and Spirituality Meet - and Do Not", 2011)
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