Preface

Summary

This book has grown out of a course I have taught five times during the last 15 years at Cornell University. The College of Arts & Sciences at Cornell has a ‘distribution requirement in science,’ which can be fulfilled in a variety of ways. The Physics Department has for many years offered a series of ‘general education’ courses; any two of them satisfy the science requirement. The descriptions of these courses in the Cornell catalog begin with the words: ‘Intended for non-scientists; does not serve as a prerequisite for further science courses. Assumes no scientific background but will use high school algebra.’ This tradition was begun in the 1950s by two distinguished physicists, Robert R. Wilson and Philip Morrison, with a two-semester sequence ‘Aspects of the Physical World,’ which became known locally as ‘Physics for Poets.’ At the present time some three or four one-semester courses for non-scientists, ‘Reasoning about Luck’ sometimes among them, are offered each year.

What I try to do in this book and why is said in Chapter 1, but some words may be useful here. I started the enterprise lightheartedly hoping to do my bit to combat the widely perceived problems of scientific illiteracy and – to use a fashionable word – innumeracy, by teaching how to reason quantitatively about the uses of probability in descriptions of the natural world. I quickly discovered that the italicized word makes for great difficulties.