Witnessing such an event involves the number of events per year, the number of In New York City each year, roughly ten people fall, jump, or are pushed in front of trains from one of more than 400 platforms. Were the odds of my arriving within fifteen minutes of such an event? House, I thought about the statistical likelihood of the subway accident: What Was riding the Staten Island ferry across New York harbor to my mother-in-law's Walked to the subway station near my apartment to await the train to Columbia.Īt the first stop after boarding the train, I heard the announcement quoted above. Pondering its potential significance for my article's conclusion as I I must confess to being quite impressed by this sort of coincidence and was To be coincidences and so must represent some new and unknown physics. His claim was that these alignments were too statistically improbable Were found lying in straight lines on the sky with separations in the ratioġ:3:4. In one of his celebrated examples, two triplets of quasars With nearby galaxies, strongly suggesting a physical association between theįound improbable numerical relationships among adjacent objects. In support of his unconventional viewpoint, he produced striking discoveries of quasars aligned Much less extreme, but at a significant cost: to explain the large redshiftsĮvident in their light, "new" (and unspecified) physics needed to be Their proximity, astronomically speaking, meant they had to produce far less Quasars are relatively nearby objects ejected from neighborhood galaxies. Some time ago, however, there was an alternative hypothesis: that Laboratories and through other astronomical observations.
These process are standard ones that have been tested in Earth-bound Trillion tons of matter each day - but the laws of physics used to describe This model invokes extreme conditions - a black hole ofĪ billion solar masses or more, its ingestion of more than 100 million The standard model, described in Chapter 3, holds that quasars are veryĭistant sources of enormous power driven by the accretion of material onto a I had just been asked to write an article for a science magazine on anĪstronomical controversy concerning quasars.
Thus began one of my most striking and memorable encounters with probability - an important object lesson in how abstract mathematical concepts We will be moving as soon as it's possible." "This train is being held in the station due to police activity at 50th Street someone has apparently fallen onto the tracks.
0 kommentar(er)
