The distribution of objects on the celestial sphere, or on an imaged patch of this sphere, has ever been a major preoccupation of astronomers. Avoiding here the science of image processing, province of thousands of books and papers, we consider some of the common statistical approaches used to quantify sky distributions in order to permit contact with theory. Before we turn to the adopted statistical weaponry of galaxy distribution, we discuss some general statistics applicable to the spherical surface.

Statistics on a spherical surface

The distribution of objects on the celestial sphere is the distribution of directions of a set of unit vectors. Many other 3D spaces face similar issues of distribution, such as the Poincaré sphere with unit vectors indicating the state of polarization of radiation. Geophysical topics (orientation of paeleomagnetism, for instance) motivate much analysis.

Thus, this is a thriving sub-field of statistics and there is an excellent handbook (Fisher et al., 1987). The emphasis is on statistical modelling and a variety of distributions is available.

Whether He does or not, the concepts of probability are important in astronomy for two reasons.

1. Astronomical measurements are subject to random measurement error, perhaps more so than most physical sciences because of our inability to re-run experiments and our perpetual wish to observe at the extreme limit of instrumental capability. We have to express these errors as precisely and usefully as we can. Thus, when we say ‘an interval of 10-6 units, centred on the measured mass of the Moon, has a 95 per cent chance of containing the true value’, it is a much more quantitative statement than ‘the mass of the Moon is 1 ± 10-6 units’. The second statement really only means anything because of some unspoken assumption about the distribution of errors. Knowing the error distribution allows us to assign a probability, or measure of confidence, to the answer.

2. The inability to do experiments on our subject matter leads us to draw conclusions by contrasting properties of controlled samples. These samples are often small and subject to uncertainty in the same way that a Gallup poll is subject to ‘sampling error’. In astronomy we draw conclusions such as: ‘the distributions of luminosity in X-ray-selected Type I and Type II objects differ at the 95 per cent level of significance.’ Very often the strength of this conclusion is dominated by the number of objects in the sample and is virtually unaffected by observational error.

Of the vast literature, we point to some works which we have found useful, enlightening or just plain entertaining. We bin these into six types (somewhat arbitrarily as there is much overlap): popular, the basic text, the rigorous text, the data analysis manual, the texts considering statistical packages, and the statistics treatments of specialist interest to astronomers.

1. The classic popular books have legendary titles: How to Lie with Statistics (Huff, 1973), Facts from Figures (Moroney, 1965), Statistics in Action (Sprent, 1977) and Statistics without Tears (Rowntree, 1981). They are all fun. To this list we can now add The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century (Salsburg, 2002), an entertaining exposition of the development of modern statistics; Struck by Lightning: the Curious World of Probabilities (Rosenthal, 2006); Making Sense of Statistics: A Non-mathematical Approach (Wood, 2003), and Dicing with Death: Chance, Risk and Health (Senn, 2003). This latter is a devastatingly blunt, funny and erudite exposition of the importance and application of statistics in decision processes which may affect the lives of millions. As a popular book it is heavy-going in parts; but for scientists, budding or mature, it is a rewarding read.

2. Textbooks come in types (a) and (b), both of which cover similar material for the first two-thirds of each book. They start with descriptive or summarizing statistics (mean, standard deviation), the distributions of these statistics, and move to the concept of probability and hence statistical inference and hypothesis testing, including correlation of two variables. […]

‘Detection’ is one of the commonest words in the practising astronomer's vocabulary. It is the preliminary to much else that happens in astronomy, whether it means locating a spectral line, a faint star or a gamma-ray burst. Indeed, of its wide range of meanings, here we take the location, and confident measurement, of some sort of feature in a fixed region of an image or spectrum. When a detection is obvious to even the most sceptical referee, statistical questions usually do not arise in the first instance. The parameters that result from such a detection have signal-to-noise ratio so high that the detection finds its way into the literature as fact. However, elusive objects or features at the limit of detectability tend to become the focus of interest in any branch of astronomy. Then, the notion of detection (and non-detection) requires careful examination and definition.

Non-detections are especially important because they define how representative any catalogue of objects may be. This set of non-detections can represent vital information in deducing the properties of a population of objects; if something is never detected, that too is a fact, and can be exploited statistically.

Phase space is a good model of what we are interested in when we talk about a certain range of possibilities. Not all possibilities can be captured in phase space, but, for certain purposes, many of the interesting ones can be. In this chapter, I will introduce the idea that we have not yet seen the most powerful and useful application of phase space: to model certain types of probabilities or chances.

The leaking tyre

You wake up to find yourself in a closed room, isolated from outside causal influence. In the middle of the room is a bicycle tyre. Because all else is quiet, you can hear that the tyre is hissing very gently, and as you go over to it, you are able to locate the small stream of air that is leaking out of a tiny hole, producing the noise. You judge, by a squeeze of the tyre, that it will take some time before the air will stop hissing out of the tyre.

What is the macro-condition of the room right now? It is one in which there is a large volume of gas at relatively low pressure, and a small volume of gas in the tyre, at relatively high pressure. Moreover, there is a small aperture between these two volumes of gas.

An unlucky gamble

Suppose you were offered the chance to play a simple gambling game, in which you are invited to bet on the outcome of a die-roll. There are only two bets allowed. You can wager that the die will land 6, or you can wager that it will land any of 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. In either case, if your wager is successful, you will win the same prize: one dollar.

So the bets are:

Assume that you know, moreover, that the die has no significant asymmetry in its construction. It does not have a physical bias to one or more sides.

Which bet ought you to take? Assuming you would prefer more money to less, it is obvious that you ought to take the bet on 1–5, rather than the bet on 6.

Now suppose that you really do play this game, and you play it at the same time as a friend. You sensibly choose to bet on 1–5. Your friend, bizarrely, insists that she has a hunch that the die will land 6; so that is the bet she takes. The die lands 6. Your friend wins.

In the previous chapter we examined phase space as a way of representing mechanical possibilities. These are the ways the world might be, assuming something like the classical picture is correct, and assuming that the world contains a certain number of particles.

Phase space does not capture all of the possibilities, but it is – I suggest – a useful set of possibilities for certain purposes. In this chapter, I want to focus on the limitations of phase space, and similarly constructed spaces of possibilities. Knowing the limits of these approaches, we'll be better placed to use them with confidence in an analysis of chance.

Propositions in phase space

Typically, when we entertain thoughts about the world, it is not in the same degree of detail as the highly specific possibilities that were introduced in the previous chapter. For instance, we might wonder about whether or not there is an elephant in the room. If we try to identify, in terms of mechanical possibilities, which mechanical possibility correlates with an elephant being in the room, then we find that there is a mismatch between the specificity of our thoughts and the mechanical possibilities. There are lots of different mechanical ways you can arrange particles in space so as to have an elephant in the room. So what might have seemed like ‘one’ possibility turns out to correspond to many different mechanical possibilities.

Possibilism

In the opening chapter, I characterised chance as the degree of belief recommended by the best identifiable advice function, given the available evidence. In the following chapters, I have sketched the sort of conceptual tools used by physicists to obtain probabilities in classical statistical mechanics: a measure over phase space. So a naive response to this presentation is to think that classical statistical mechanics actually tells us what makes a fact of chance. It is a measure over a space of possibilities. The space of possibilities contains the states the system might be in, given the available evidence. Given the right measure – something that we have confirmed by experience – chances are just facts about the relative measures of different macro-conditions. Call this the modal volume theory of chance. In order to assess this idea adequately, we first need to unpack it.

Chances are ratios of volumes

Given I toss a coin, what is the chance that it will land heads? The answer has something to do with two sets of possibilities: that in which I toss a coin, and that in which I toss a coin and it lands heads.

The idea that chances are facts about real possibilities is – to many – an outlandishly metaphysical claim. It makes chance seem more like a philosopher's fantasy than anything else. One way of avoiding the idea that chances are facts about possibilities is to attempt to identify some non-chancy facts in the actual world which constitute the basis of probabilities. What I call actualist approaches thus maintain that chances are mind-independent and real, but hold that they are reducible to ‘this-worldly’ phenomena.

Actualist interpretations of chance

The actualist approach is associated with David Hume's famous discussion of the concept of causation. Hume observed that the concept of causation appeared to involve a necessary connection between cause and effect: given the cause, the effect must happen. But upon close inspection, Hume found that there was no observable correlate of such necessary connections. Exactly what conclusion Hume drew from this is still disputed, but one very influential interpretation of his thought is that he believed therefore that causation was in reality nothing more than the constant conjunction of two types of event. Seeing two events of a particular type occur together in time and space, again and again, produces in us a belief that they are causally connected, and that belief has an associated feeling that the connection is necessary.

The time asymmetry of chance

If there are real chances, then it seems as though there are ‘more’ of them, in some sense, in the future. To illustrate, take some events which are governed by stochastic laws. For instance, at the tip of my nose, there is an atom of carbon-14, the radioactive form of carbon. Being radioactive, there is some chance that the atom will undergo radioactive decay. The typical type of decay for carbon-14 is known as beta-minus decay. This is a process whereby an atom emits two particles: an electron and an electron anti-neutrino, and in addition one of the atom's neutrons is converted to a proton. The result, when this occurs in an atom of carbon-14, is that it becomes an atom of nitrogen-14.

Whether this particular atom of carbon-14 will decay in the next year is a matter of chance. The chance is very small, but greater than zero. In contrast, for the year that has just passed, it seems that there is nothing chancy about what happened to the atom. The atom of carbon-14 ‘got here’ in one particular way – though we may not know what that is – and there is no chance that it in fact developed in any different way.

In this chapter, I examine a number of ways in which one can take a less realist attitude towards chance than I have been adopting thus far. It turns out that there are at least three important varieties of anti-realism, and it pays to distinguish between them carefully.

Varieties of anti-realism

To this point, I have assumed some form of objectivism about chance. By this, I mean that the sorts of facts that make chance ascriptions true are – by and large – facts that obtain independently of our beliefs and attitudes.1 An alternative, subjectivist view is that the truth about chances depends in some way on subjective facts, such as what we believe, desire, or expect. That I like dark chocolate more than other varieties is a subjective fact. Prima facie, that the coin is fair, and thus has an even chance of landing heads or tails, is not a subjective fact, because this fact about the coin surely does not depend on anything to do with anyone's attitude to the coin. But perhaps that appearance is mistaken, and subjectivism might provide a better approach to understanding chance.

Both objectivism and subjectivism assume that chance claims represent facts. But this assumption too can be denied. Some meaningful sentences seem to have meaning without representing facts.

As we saw in the previous chapter, the Everett interpretation seems to dispense with probabilities in quantum mechanics. Instead of describing a world for which many things are possible, but only some of those possibilities are actualised, it suggests a world in which all possibilities actually happen. Moreover, this is something of which we can be absolutely certain.

Obviously, this does not straightforwardly fit our experience. We do not see multiple possibilities becoming actual. Whenever we measure a superposed particle, we observe only one property or another. Moreover, we have a very useful probabilistic rule to help us to predict what we will see. How can the success of this probabilistic rule be explained, if an Everett world does not involve any uncertainty?

There are two main moves that are employed in response to this challenge. The first – what I call Stage A – is to show that there is a relevant sort of uncertainty, even in a universe where we are certain that everything will happen. The second move – Stage B – is to try to vindicate the probability of the Born rule in particular. That is, to show that we should not merely be uncertain about the future, but that we have good reason to attach the particular probabilities dictated by the Born rule to the possible outcomes of a quantum experiment. We will consider these two stages in turn.