Clearing up Mysteries — The Original Goal

We show how the character of a scientific theory depends on one’s attitude toward probability. Many circumstances seem mysterious or paradoxical to one who thinks that probabilities are physically real things. But when we adopt the “Bayesian Inference” viewpoint of Harold Jeffreys, paradoxes often become simple platitudes and we have a more powerful tool for useful calculations. This is illustrated by three examples from widely different fields: diffusion in kinetic theory, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox in quantum theory, and the second law of thermodynamics in biology.

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