Free Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos by Peter M. Hoffmann Page A

But is that really true?
    Until the end of the nineteenth century, everybody believed that randomness had no place in any explanation of the world. People disagreed, however, how the specter of randomness was to be exorcised. The mechanists believed in mechanical necessity: If we knew the locations andspeeds of all the particles in the universe at some point in time, and had a powerful enough computer, we could predict every future event. The religionists instead believed in the unfathomable will of God. If you couldn’t explain why something happened, the explanation was that God wanted it this way. And the philosophers believed in . . . just about everything, except randomness. The consensus was that if something happened by chance, it only seemed that way because of our ignorance of all the circumstances.
    Yet, clearly, many events seemed out of reach of our predictions. One way to deal with unpredictability was to accept it as fate, the will of God, or human ignorance. Another way was to find ways to quantify our ignorance, to tame the unpredictable.
A Short History of Gambling
     
    The first time anybody ever thought about quantifying unpredictability was not in the name of science, but in the name of making a quick buck (or whatever currency they had at the time). The goal was to know how much to wager in a game of chance.
    Gambling is an ancient pastime: Roman soldiers guarding the body of Jesus on the cross gambled for his meager belongings. Today, gambling is as popular as ever. Las Vegas, an entire city located in a place where there shouldn’t be a city, is dedicated to this sinful activity. The city hosts poker championships, and there are always roulette games, blackjack, slot machines, and numerous other means to help you lose your money.
    Poker has become something of a fad in recent years, especially among physicists. Unfortunately, my physics credentials are not much help: I am a lousy poker player. The problem is that I am terrible at bluffing. All good poker players can hide their emotions and are excellent strategists. But why should physicists in general (myself excluded) be any good at this game? The reason is that physicists understand probabilities.
    As I understand poker, there are two ways of winning: getting a better hand than the other players, or making the other players believe you have a better hand. What makes a poker hand better? A poker hand is better if it is rarer, that is, if getting such a hand happens on average less often than getting a less valued hand. How often, on average, certain hands appearin a set of five cards selected at random is described by the probability of the hand. The probability of getting a royal flush—an ordered sequence (or straight) of cards of the same suit, starting with an ace—is 1 in 649,740. The probability of getting a pair (two cards of the same value) is much higher: 1 in 2.36. What does that mean? It means that in a very large number of randomly dealt five-card hands, a pair will occur about once every 2.36 deals, while a royal flush can only be expected every 649,740 deals. Of course, this does not mean that if you play 650,000 times, you can be guaranteed to be dealt a royal flush. Rather, it means that if you play billions or trillions of times, the number of royal flushes you are dealt divided by the number of total games would approach 1/649,740. But nobody has ever played poker a billion times. So how can we know?
    The idea that different outcomes in games of chance, such as poker or dice, have different likelihoods, seems to be as old as gambling itself. How else would you determine how much to wager? Yet, for a long time, the probability of different outcomes was based on experience or feelings, rather than on quantifiable science.
    In the movie 21 , Kevin Spacey portrays a morally impaired MIT mathematics professor, who teaches his students how to break the bank playing blackjack. Using card counting and secret signs, the students descend on