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In a recent Swedish historical novel, about the rampaging of Swedish troops
in Poland during the early 18th Century, there is a short passage about crossing of random trajectories.
(Sundman and Drake are two army officers, Sundman being questioned about a
massacre):
"- Actually, the death of a warrior is impossible, says Sundman. - Did you ever
think of that? Because it presupposes that two different lines meet exactly at
the right moment.
Sundman crosses his two index fingers.
- On one side, man's infinitely complicated life path, as it has been running,
all from his birth, through love and hatred, via hopes and disappointments, over
countries and lands, a path that is meandering, searching, random,
unpredictable. And on the other side, the plain, straight, simple path of the
bullet. If a mathematician were to calculate the probability of that crossing
right here and right now, then he would say that the chance is so astronomically
minute that it is practically null.
Sundman's words are met with compact silence. Drake looks at Sundman, answers:
- What bullshit."
This may not be historically interesting - probably it is not even possible that a low rank army officer thought in such advanced terms 150 years before Brown, 200 years before Einstein's analysis of Brownian motion, and 250 before the general theory of stochastic processes. But it is interesting as a document of our times. It is NOW, not 1706, that people at large start thinking in terms of chance and probability in less trivial contexts than hazard games. Stochastics is the paradigm of the 21st Century, permeating science from physics and biology to economics, medicine, and engineering, and indeed suggesting a new way of thinking, explaining, and predicting, as compared to Newtonian determinism.
A great time for the Bernoulli Society!
Peter Jagers
President