August 2022
Intermediate to advanced
336 pages
10h 41m
English
…the theory of probability is basically just common sense reduced to calculation…1
Pierre-Simon Laplace
In 1815, Laplace2 reported a calculation of the mass of Saturn to the French National Institute of Sciences and Arts: one part in 3512 of that of the mass of the Sun. The importance of the calculation lies not in its accuracy, though the value differs by less that 0.4 % of the current value of roughly 3499, but that the calculation used the formalism of probability. The difficulty in such a calculation was in combining all the different data existing at the time, stretching from antiquity to contemporary observations, all with different reliabilities. Laplace ...
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