What is the Deep Meaning of Probability? | Episode 2206 | Closer To Truth

It sounds cheesy but I feel lucky to have lived in the same era as Mr. Kuhn and this show

If there were gold ribbons for "BEST of show," this one in THIS topic wins hands down.. Whether right or wrong, I've always thought of probabilities as related in SOME fashion to simple averaging.. When one dwells on the idea of WHY this averaging evolves over time and in the absence of influences from past results... Well, we just escaped the perimeters of science.. Good stuff..

The second type (for large numbers, small probability) the distribution is not called Gaussian, it is Poisson.

7:00 I thought he was going to go to Vegas when he wanted to observe probability in the wild.

I love the intro

Beautiful and poetic treatment

Their chairs are awesome

Learning about non-linear oscillators, chaos and all that in Junior-level Classical Mechanics course put the "WOW!" back into Physics for me. Thanks, Professor Peter Scott (1933-2024), UC Santa Cruz (1983)! We studied the Düffing Oscillator and he had a real demo of it as well. The Logistic Map was another goodie he encouraged us to play with on a computer. We covered perturbation theory in the context of non-linear oscillators and the 3-body central force problem; it's fascinating how complexity arises when you "tweak things just a bit". Physics Honchos like Poincaré worked on non-linear mechanics in the early 1900's; he and others showed that "these are *really* hard problems". Little more was done up to Edward Lorenz's modeling of weather in 1963, with the arrival of digital computers. Non-linear systems are covered in "Nonlinear Oscillations" Ch.5 of "Classical Dynamics" (2nd ed.) by Jerry Marion, and in "Canonical Perturbation Theory" Ch.11 of "Classical Mechanics" (2nd ed.) by Herbert Goldstein. "Chaos: Making a New Science" by James Gleick is still a great read.

Great episode.

I loved probability since I was a kid