The Physics of Chance

The author shows how the laws of probability and statistics were developed by such mathematicians as Fermat, Pascal, and Gauss, and how they received their first major application in physics in the kinetic theory of gases developed by Maxwell and Boltzmann. Soon the mathematician and physicist Poincare demonstrated the unpredictability of certain systems containing only a small number of bodies, because of extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. He thus became a founder of chaos theory. With the advent of quantum theory, physics seemed to be based on an essential randomness, whose reality was debated by Bohr and Einstein till the end of their lives.