Probability

      While coming home recently I was thinking about quantum physics (as usual. I'm on par with The Fonz in terms of coolness. Who's got two thumbs and an interest in particle physics? This guy. People who aren't aware of Happy Days are confused right now. Which makes up a large section of my reader base I believe.) when a thought occurred: today something less likely than a tree just disappearing happened. In fact, billions of events that are several orders of magnitude less likely to happen than a tree disappearing must have happened.
      Let's take a step back and look at the nature of probability. Say I roll a fair six sided die ten times, what is the probability I get ten sixes? The answer is one over six to the power of ten, which is about 0.000000016538171687920. I totally just did that in my head. Suffice to say, it's unlikely to happen. This is also the probability that any given combination (in a given order) will happen. One over it will give the number of possibilities, which is 604664176. So every combination of numbers is very, very unlikely, but obviously one is bound to occur. So we end up with a very unlikely, but also probably a dull, combination of rolls. The lottery is another good example of this. If I were to buy a ticket with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 many people would say it's incredibly unlikely that I'd win. And they would, of course, be right. Because all the numbers are incredibly unlikely to be drawn, but that doesn't stop people from buying tickets. The fact is my ticket would be just as likely to win as any other, although it might have more of a split pot as I imagine a lot of statisticians would have bought the same ticket to make a point.
      So back to the tree. Quantum physics is a probabilistic set of rules, as opposed to the deterministic rules we automatically assume the universe abides by. I can't go into how or why that makes sense, partly because I don't have much time, but mostly because it quite simply doesn't make sense by conventional thought, it just is. So an electron can randomly go in any direction, even if it's part of a solid, it's just not very likely. The chances of it happening that all the components of an entire tree randomly stop being connected are incredibly small. Mind bogglingly small. But it's possible. And there are many things like it happening all the time, just not in an interesting way. It's exactly the same as with the die from earlier. Incredibly unlikely, yet uninteresting events happen when an event is bound to have a single outcome from a large set of possibilities. There's a bit more to this that I was going to get into, particularly about the law of very large numbers, but I think that can wait for another time. So I will leave you with this thought provoking question: If our universe is infinite, our lives short and time precious, why in the hell would someone end up on my blog after searching autism orgasm?