From: Christopher Tong <ctong@physics.purdue.edu>
Subject: Re: Is Probability physically meaingless?
Date: 9 May 2000 22:15:15 GMT
Newsgroups: sci.physics.research
Summary: [missing]

On 8 May 2000 alfred_einstead@my-deja.com wrote:

> The question which stands at the focus of the subject header is this:
> 
>           How does one falsify the statement Pr(E) = 1/2?
> 
> where E is some kind of physical event.

In Richard Hamming's "The Art of Probability for Scientists
and Engineers" (1993), he says of the frequentist interpretation,
"this approach...seemed to me to be non-operational
and furthermore excluded important and interesting situations" (preface).
Later, he quotes de Finetti who "wrote at the opening of
his two volume treatise ["Theory of Probability"],
PROBABILITY DOES NOT EXIST".  Hamming sympathizes with this
view but finally cannot accept it (pp. 296-7).

Also, "probability in quantum mechanics is different from
that in other fields.  In quantum mechanics probability
is an undefined thing in the sense that it is simply
the square of the absolute value of the corresponding
wave function and does not have a more elementary
description" (p. 301).

He does not talk about Turing complexity, but you might be
entertained by reading ch. 8 of his book.