Uncertainty is everywhere. It lurks in every consideration of the
future - the weather, the economy, the sex of an unborn child -
even quantities we think that we know such as populations or the
transit of the planets contain the possibility of error. It's no
wonder that, throughout that history, we have attempted to produce
rigidly defined areas of uncertainty - we prefer the surprise party
to the surprise asteroid. We began our quest to make certain an
uncertain world by reading omens in livers, tea leaves, and the
stars. However, over the centuries, driven by curiosity,
competition, and a desire be better gamblers, pioneering
mathematicians and scientists began to reduce wild uncertainties to
tame distributions of probability and statistical inferences. But,
even as unknown unknowns became known unknowns, our pessimism made
us believe that some problems were unsolvable and our intuition
misled us. Worse, as we realized how omnipresent and varied
uncertainty is, we encountered chaos, quantum mechanics, and the
limitations of our predictive power. Bestselling author Professor
Ian Stewart explores the history and mathematics of uncertainty.
Touching on gambling, probability, statistics, financial and
weather forecasts, censuses, medical studies, chaos, quantum
physics, and climate, he makes one thing clear: a reasonable
probability is the only certainty.
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