Wasn't that the point of much of Gravity's Rainbow? jf
On Monday, April 22, 2002, at 08:53 AM, Seth Hurwitz wrote:
> An unexpected strength of What are the Chances? is Holland's discussion
> about testing hypotheses, which illustrates how probability is an
> inherent part of so much scientific analysis. For example, in the Second
> World War, Londoners frequently asserted that Germany was targeting its
> V2 bombs because they fell in clusters, but there was no known
> technology that could achieve such accuracy.
>
> To test the targeting theory, London was divided into 576 squares.
> While 440 squares suffered no hits or one hit, 35 squares received 3
> hits and 8 squares received 4 or more hits. Intuitively, this feels like
> targeting, but in fact the data is a very good fit to a Poisson
> distribution, implying that the bombs fell randomly. Of course, the same
> approach can be used to determine whether the clustering of disease or
> anything else is significant or coincidence.
>
> In a time when anecdote and panic seem to influence public policy more
> than objective analysis, Holland has provided a welcome reminder of the
> power of the analytical approach. Stephen Jay Gould once wrote that a
> misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments
> to scientific literacy. The problem is that the people who read this
> book are probably those who already to appreciate the scientific method
> to some extent.
>
> http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opbooks.jsp?id=ns23396
>
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