Robert R. Coveyou Quotes
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
This quotation is important because it illustrates a common problem politicians have with funding science and mathematical research. Actually, so far many millions of dollars have gone into studying and developing methods of producing random numbers and sequences of them which are extremely important to many branches of science and essential to the operation of computers. Yet to the layman, the expense of public money to find better ways to pick random numbers seems totally absurd. Just pick one or use any random number. However, it is virtually impossible for a human being to truly randomly pick a number from 1-999. Most methods produce biases which invalidate the randomness. But this is very counter intuitive. So much decision making about scientific funding and policy is counter intuitive to the politician and the general public.
Robert R. Coveyou, Mathematician, Physicist & Civil Rights Advocate, Member of the Atom Bomb Development Team at Los Alamos & Oak Ridge, Title of an article, 1970, Quoted in Gideon Keren and Charles Lewis, A Handbook for data analysis in the behavioral sciences
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This quotation was from a mathematician who was in the midst of the expansion of mathematics in the late 19th century to include the then rapid and rich development of Probability. This required mathematicians, scientists and others who would use the new mathematics to think in a very different way. For the existing mathematicians his quote clearly states the dilemma for them. Today, scientists and mathematicians have little trouble with “laws of probability” and realize that Probability is governed and controlled in the same way as other fields of mathematics; they are comfortable with different results occurring under the exact same experimental conditions, and those different results are unpredictable in any particular instance, but exactly predictable in terms of frequency of each possible occurrence. This makes Quantum Mechanics rational. However, few non scientists have had their thinking expanded and are comfortable with this thinking. Law and public policy makers are particularly vexed by not being able to think and work in this paradigm where consequences of something can be described for a population precisely, and yet be impossible to describe for any particular individual. This will improve over time, as politicians and other community leaders become better educated mathematically and scientifically.
Politicians, like many other people, often confuse correlation with causality as few have studied or understand the mathematics of probability.
While this was certainly true in Ancient times, modernity has given us Public Health and other techniques that now enable us to prevent accidents. Automobile safety from seat belts and air bags are good examples. From a political point of view, however, accidents can and often do control the political landscape as in the unexpected death of a national leader. Often natural disasters are included in the general term “accidents” where the meaning is taken as that which is beyond human control.
We can and do influence life greatly, for the good and the bad. Public health and human extermination of species by over use are good examples.
Robert R. (Bob) Coveyou was an American research mathematician who worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He also taught mathematics part-time for several years at Knoxville College and worked at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, while on leave from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1968 until 1971.
