On Chance (1950-1974)

"Historically, the original purpose of the theory of probability was to describe the exceedingly narrow domain of experience connected with games of chance, and the main effort was directed to the calculation of certain probabilities." (William Feller, "An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications", 1950)

"The painful experience of many gamblers has taught us the lesson that no system of betting is successful in improving the gambler's chances. If the theory of probability is true to life, this experience must correspond to a provable statement." (William Feller, "An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications", 1950)

"In a sense, of course, probability theory in the form of the simple laws of chance is the key to the analysis of warfare; […] My own experience of actual operational research work, has however, shown that its is generally possible to avoid using anything more sophisticated. […] In fact the wise operational research worker attempts to concentrate his efforts in finding results which are so obvious as not to need elaborate statistical methods to demonstrate their truth. In this sense advanced probability theory is something one has to know about in order to avoid having to use it." (Patrick M S Blackett, "Operations Research", Physics Today, 1951)

"Indeed, the laws of chance are just as necessary as the causal laws themselves." (David Bohm, "Causality and Chance in Modern Physics", 1957)

"Chaos is but unperceived order; it is a word indicating the limitations of the human mind and the paucity of observational facts. The words ‘chaos’, ‘accidental’, ‘chance’, ‘unpredictable’ are conveniences behind which we hide our ignorance." (Harlow Shapley, "Of Stars and Men: Human Response to an Expanding Universe", 1958)

"If simple perfect laws uniquely rule the universe, should not pure thought be capable of uncovering this perfect set of laws without having to lean on the crutches of tenuously assembled observations? True, the laws to be discovered may be perfect, but the human brain is not. Left on its own, it is prone to stray, as many past examples sadly prove. In fact, we have missed few chances to err until new data freshly gleaned from nature set us right again for the next steps. Thus pillars rather than crutches are the observations on which we base our theories; and for the theory of stellar evolution these pillars must be there before we can get far on the right track." (Erwin Schrödinger & Martin Schwarzschild, "Structure and Evolution of the Stars", 1958)

"Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe - in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself." (Robert A Heinlein, "Stranger in a Strange Land", 1961)

"Can there be laws of chance? The answer, it would seem should be negative, since chance is in fact defined as the characteristic of the phenomena which follow no law, phenomena whose causes are too complex to permit prediction." (Félix E Borel, "Probabilities and Life", 1962)

"The equanimity of your average tosser of coins depends upon a law, or rather a tendency, or let us say a probability, or at any rate a mathematically calculable chance, which ensures that he will not upset himself by losing too much nor upset his opponent by winning too often." (Tom Stoppard, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead", 1967)

"Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not 'corrected' as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted." (Amos Tversky, "Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases", 1974)

"We know the laws of trial and error, of large numbers and probabilities. We know that these laws are part of the mathematical and mechanical fabric of the universe, and that they are also at play in biological processes. But, in the name of the experimental method and out of our poor knowledge, are we really entitled to claim that everything happens by chance, to the exclusion of all other possibilities?" (Albert Claude, "The Coming Age of the Cell", Nobel Prize Lecture] 1974)