On Randomness VIII (Events II)

"Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place." (James G Ballard, [Conversation with George MacBeth on Third Programme - BBC], 1967)

"Events may appear to us to be random, but this could be attributed to human ignorance about the details of the processes involved." (Brain S Everitt, "Chance Rules", 1999)

"That randomness gives rise to innovation and diversity in nature is echoed by the notion that chance is also the source of invention in the arts and everyday affairs in which naturally occurring processes are balanced between tight organization, where redundancy is paramount, and volatility, in which little order is possible. One can argue that there is a difference in kind between the unconscious, and sometimes conscious, choices made by a writer or artist in creating a string of words or musical notes and the accidental succession of events taking place in the natural world. However, it is the perception of ambiguity in a string that matters, and not the process that generated it, whether it be man-made or from nature at large." (Edward Beltrami, "What is Random?: Chaos and Order in Mathematics and Life", 1999)

"The subject of probability begins by assuming that some mechanism of uncertainty is at work giving rise to what is called randomness, but it is not necessary to distinguish between chance that occurs because of some hidden order that may exist and chance that is the result of blind lawlessness. This mechanism, figuratively speaking, churns out a succession of events, each individually unpredictable, or it conspires to produce an unforeseeable outcome each time a large ensemble of possibilities is sampled."  (Edward Beltrami, "What is Random?: Chaos and Order in Mathematics and Life", 1999)

"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." (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)

"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)

"Quantum physicists today are reconciled to randomness at the individual event level, but to expect causality to underlie statistical quantum phenomena is reasonable. Suppose a person shakes an ink pen such that ink spots are formed on a white wall, in what appears for all intents and purposes, randomly. Let us further suppose the random ink spots accumulate to form precise pictures of different known persons' faces every time. We will not regard the overall result to be a happenchance; we are apt to suspect there must be a 'method' to the person who is shaking the ink pen." (Ravi Gomatam) [response to Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg's article "Einstein's Mistakes", Physics Today Vol. 59 (4), 2005]

"We are hardwired to make sense of the world around us - to notice patterns and invent theories to explain these patterns. We underestimate how easily pat - terns can be created by inexplicable random events - by good luck and bad luck." (Gary Smith, "Standard Deviations", 2014)