The Empire of Chance Ho Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life [Paperback]

Connects the earliest applications of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent applications in law, medicine, polling, and baseball as well as their impact on biology, physics and psychology.Connects the earliest applications of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent applications in law, medicine, polling, and baseball as well as their impact on biology, physics and psychology.This book tells how quantitative ideas of chance have transformed the natural and social sciences as well as everyday life over the past three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling, and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact on biology, physics, and psychology. In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this book centers on how these technical innovations recreated our conceptions of nature, mind, and society.Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Classical probabilities, 16601840; 2. Statistical probabilities, 18201900; 3. The inference experts; 4. Chance and life: controversies in modern biology; 5. The probabilistic revolution in physics; 6. Statistics of the mind; 7. Numbers rule the world; 8. The implications of chance; References; Name index; Subject index. ...will be useful to statisticians, philosophers, scientists and other historians of science who want to understand the roots of the probability-based statistical methods we use so widely today...The Empire of Chance is a valuable book. Science In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probablilty and statistics, this book focuses on how technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind, and society. The work is aimed at historians of science and philosophers of science, but it is also directed toward scholarslã