What are the Chances of That? is a new book from the author of Is That a Big Number?. It will be published by Oxford University Press in 2021, and will be available from all good booksellers (details to come).
Here's an idea of what the book contains:
Understanding chance can be a matter of life and death - five dualities that confuse us when we think about uncertainty - what this book is NOT - what this book IS - the language we use to talk about chance - Ways to show chance.
Meet the man who wrote the book on games of chance.
Games of chance - What is probability, anyway? - Sarah plays roulette - Paul plays craps - how long is the long run? - asymmetry between gambler and casino.
Rolling the bones - quantifying chance - Cardano, Fermat, Pascal, Huygens, Bernoulli - what took them so long?
What is randomness? - quantum - entropy - generating randomness - the continuous casino.
Kinds of randomness - counting the ways - how long to wait? - what is normal? - models and reality.
In seventeenth-century London, he counted them in and he counted them out.
The compulsion to find meaning in mere chance - the anatomy of coincidence - how to explain away a coincidence - the inevitability of miracles.
The luckiest man in the world - the wheel of fortune - using chance for bad guidance - using chance for good guidance - the paradox of fairness.
The thrill of risk - lotteries - chances of poker hands - racetrack odds - betting on politics - wonderful wagers.
How do we die? - causes of death in John Graunt's London - causes of death in modern Britain - when do we die? - childhood mortality.
Reflections on an imminent pandemic - lifestyle risks - unnatural deaths - risks of travel - natural disasters - violence.
What happens when an engineer-architect turns his hand to avant-garde music?
Buried treasure - the role of sloppy laboratories in chemistry - a taxonomy of serendipity - accidental or inevitable?
Random Mozart - musical improvisation - using chance in composition - sponaneity.
The role of chance in assembling DNA - random damage to DNA - the chance of evolving a banana - evolution seen through the five dualities - what are the chances that we are here now?.
Beautiful noise - jittering, dithering, and scrambling - evolution in the machine - genetic algorithms.
She made her name in the Scutari Hospital during the Crimean War, but her real achievements came afterwards.
The probability of past events - the burden of proof - the Reverend Bayes - measuring evidence - fallible prosecutors - priors and prejudice.
The mathematical underpinning of reality - seeing through the mist - in search of causes - the damage done by smoking cigarettes - in search of understanding.
Insuring astronauts - safety in numbers - mutuality - marine insurance - fire insurance - life insurance - too much information? - pools and floods.
Backgammon - hedging - avoiding financial risk - seeking financial risk - systemic risk
Is an umbrella needed? - chaos - chained events in political predictions - the end is nigh (again) - the millennium bug and the ozone hole - the threats that face us now.
It's no game - a sixth duality - take your chances.
Five reasons that we find it hard to think about uncertainty.
Click here to learn more about it.
"This is a fun and riveting book. Written in an accessible and engaging way, it is unputdownable." Frost Magazine