Stochastics

Abstract

The idea to include chance in a model of reality may be traced back even to antiquity. The Epicuraeans held that the irregular motion of atoms arises because individual atoms stray “without cause” from their straight paths. Such views necessarily elicited angry opposition from those scholars who believed in predetermination. And even the “philosophy professor” Cicero, himself an eminent critic of the exaggerated causality doctrine of the Stoics, comments caustically:

“So what new cause is there in nature to make the atoms swerve? Or do they draw lots among themselves which will swerve and which not? Or do they swerve by a minimum interval and not by a larger one, or why do they swerve by one minimum and not by two or three? This is wishful thinking, not argument.” [Cicero −44]