1 - Introduction

Summary

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility

Albert Einstein

The purpose of this little book is to introduce the interested non-scientist to statistical reasoning and its use in physics. I have in mind someone who knows little mathematics and little or no physics. My wider aim is to capture something of the nature of the scientific enterprise as it is carried out by physicists – particularly theoretical physicists.

Every physicist is familiar with the amiable party conversation that ensues when someone – whose high school experience of physics left a residue of dread and despair – says brightly: ‘How interesting! What kind of physics do you do?’ How natural to hope that passing from the general to the particular might dispel the dread and alleviate the despair. Inevitably, though, such a conversation is burdened by a sense of futility: because there are few common premises, there is no reasonable starting point. Yet it would be foolishly arrogant not to recognize the seriousness behind the question. As culprit or as savior, science is perceived as the force in modern society, and scientific illiteracy is out of fashion.

However much I would like to be a guru in a new surge toward literacy in physics, ministering to the masses on television and becoming rich beyond the dreams of avarice, this, alas, is not to be.