Dice World: Science and Life in a Random Universe

by Brian Clegg

For centuries scientists believed that the universe was a vast machine – with enough detail, you could predict exactly what would happen. Admittedly real life wasn’t like that. But only, they argued, because we didn’t have enough data to be certain.

Then the cracks began to appear. It proved impossible to predict exactly how three planets orbiting each other would move. Meteorologists discovered that the weather was truly chaotic – so dependent on small variations that it could never be predicted for more than a few days out. And the final nail in the coffin was quantum theory, showing that everything in the universe has probability at its heart.

That gives human beings a problem. We understand the world through patterns. Randomness and probability will always be alien to us. But it’s time to plunge into this fascinating, shadowy world, because randomness crops up everywhere. Probability and statistics are the only way to get a grip on nature’s workings. They may even seal the fate of free will and predict how the universe will end.

Forget Newton’s clockwork universe. Welcome to Dice World.

Genres: Science, Physics, Mathematics, Nonfiction, Reference, Popular Science

288 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2013

About the author

Brian's latest books, Ten Billion Tomorrows and How Many Moons does the Earth Have are now available to pre-order. He has written a range of other science titles, including the bestselling Inflight Science, The God Effect, Before the Big Bang, A Brief History of Infinity, Build Your Own Time Machine and Dice World.

Along with appearances at the Royal Institution in London he has spoken at venues from Oxford and Cambridge Universities to Cheltenham Festival of Science, has contributed to radio and TV programmes, and is a popular speaker at schools. Brian is also editor of the successful www.popularscience.co.uk book review site and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Brian has Masters degrees from Cambridge University in Natural Sciences and from Lancaster University in Operational Research, a discipline originally developed during the Second World War to apply the power of mathematics to warfare. It has since been widely applied to problem solving and decision making in business.

Brian has also written regular columns, features and reviews for numerous publications, including Nature, The Guardian, PC Week, Computer Weekly, Personal Computer World, The Observer, Innovative Leader, Professional Manager, BBC History, Good Housekeeping and House Beautiful. His books have been translated into many languages, including German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Turkish, Norwegian, Thai and even Indonesian.

Reviews

[Koen Crolla · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm genuinely annoyed to live in a world where this book found a publisher. Here is a man who set out to write a book about randomness, but who thinks it's vitally important to distinguish between classical randomness and chaotic randomness, and that the difference is that classical randomness is independent events (like individual coin tosses) distributed along a bell curve (unlike individual coin tosses, actually), while chaotic randomness is fundamentally unpredictable (????????). And that what distinguishes PRNGs from true RNGs is that PRNGs produce lower-quality random numbers (even though PRNGs are an example of chaotic randomness—which he fails to note—so by his explanation they should be higher-quality).

There have been books that have made a complete mess of their central premise but still managed to be broadly interesting or entertaining because of the engaging detours the author took on the way to their trainwreck of a conclusion; Dice World isn't one of those. Clegg strays into history, anthropology, economics, and physics, and manages to be as under-informed about those as he is about chaos theory and probability, alternating between breath-taking pretentiousness (explaining the concept of the arithmetic mean by starting from QED's sum-over-paths) and pig-ignorance (not actually knowing the word ``mean'' and calling it ``the average'' in a discussion that also involves medians and modes).
By the time he got to Schrödinger's cat and many-worlds, I was understandably skimming, though not shallowly enough to miss him fucking up trying to communicate Roger Penrose's quantum free will bullshit at the end (speaking of books that managed to be somewhat interesting despite having a godawful premise).

I've previously reviewed A Brief History of Infinity by Clegg, and it suffered from many of the same problems. I don't intend to find out if these two were outliers or if this is a trend.

[Ami Iida · Rating 1 out of 5]

I fail to read it.

[Fuzzball Baggins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned a lot and was entertained at the same time

[Stewart · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the past 25 years, a number of insightful books about the role of randomness in our lives and the importance of knowing about the laws of probability have been written. So if a book is published after 2010, I have to ask: Is the book necessary and does it add information and insight on the topic.
“Dice World: Science and Life in a Random Universe” by Brian Clegg, first published in the U.K. in 2013, didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know and didn’t add information or insight that previous books such as “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Probable” (2007) or “Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” (2008) already provided.
Clegg’s book will give the reader a fairly good summary of probability theory, the importance of luck in achieving success, and the randomness in the universe in its 274 pages, but if one is well-read on the subject it will not likely provide anything new.

[Lachinchon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I suppose it is my fault. What should one expect from a book titled Dice World? Not, apparently, a discourse on quantum physics and/or chaos theory and how each manifests itself in the structure of the universe (or multiverse) or the everyday "reality" of the non-scientist. Yes, both of these subjects have roles in the book, but more like the relish tray than the main course. Mostly it is a discourse on probability and statistics, followed by more probability and statistics. I am not a scientist, mathematician, or statistician, just fairly well read, and this book informed me of very little I did not already know. As to trying to adequately discuss the issue of free will in the last dozen pages- bathroom reading only.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

While it has a bit about randomness in Quantum Physics much more of the book is a general look at the ideas and maths behind randomness. An excellent basic introduction with very little knowledge of maths required.

[Ron · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fairly interesting and not overly technical discussion of how we can now best understand the world through grappling with the statistical randomness that seems to underlie the quantum world. The randomness he talks about goes from the certainty that a radioactive nucleus will decay but the impossibility of knowing when that will occur, to the statistical certainty of unforeseeable future events, but not knowing what those events will be or when they might happen. It is about how to cope intellectually with the unstable structure underpinning the visible and workable structure of the world as humans experience it.
An interesting enough book that goes over some issues I have confronted before, but puts new slants on other concepts. He refers to Black Swan events, which I will pursue in The Black Swan sometime soon.
I will remember that God seems to be a nerdish statistician with a gruesome sense of humor.

[Damian Knight · Rating 5 out of 5]

a wonderful journey through maths

[Daniel Morales · Rating 3 out of 5]

Termodinámica, caos, azar, Bayes, loterías, libre albedrío. Una mezcolanza.

[Stefan Fairweather · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started off easy but got pretty heavy going in the later half! Week written and readable though. Don't pick this up for light reading.

[Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this book up expecting explanation and analysis of the randomness of the world from the luck of gambling to the occurrences of natural disasters. And while Clegg does briefly cover the science behind these, he seems more focused on the mathematics of statistics and probability, which isn't something that interests me (in fact I find it rather soul destroying) so I did find myself skimming the more detailed mathematics, probabilities and statistics sections. Add to that the fact that he tries to cover free will in the last fourteen pages, a subject that requires much more than that, just adds to the confusion of this book as it doesn't fit with any of the other chapters and just isn't sufficient for such an expansive subject. While this doesn't fit my expectations, Clegg does explain each of his concepts clearly and in an easy to read fashion which goes in his favour but the purpose of the book does remain lost.

[Ogi Ogas · Rating 2 out of 5]

My ratings of books on Goodreads are solely a crude ranking of their utility to me, and not an evaluation of literary merit, entertainment value, social importance, humor, insightfulness, scientific accuracy, creative vigor, suspensefulness of plot, depth of characters, vitality of theme, excitement of climax, satisfaction of ending, or any other combination of dimensions of value which we are expected to boil down through some fabulous alchemy into a single digit.

[Snoakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brian Clegg writes engaging and entertaining popular science books and this one is no exception. Never too heavy, it's a top-level look at randomness, statistics and chaos in our world. There is one thing I particularly love about Brian Clegg's writing though - whenever he introduces a hypothetical scientist, he always assumes she's a woman.

[Heiko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very readable introduction to randomness and statistics.
The book gives the reader a good impression on the mistakes a lot of us make when it comes to using statistical thinking.
There are other books on this subject but here a broad area of fields is covered. It definitely is a good introduction to the subject and makes one look in more depth.

[Steve Gillway · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a kindly sage Clegg dispenses clear insightful logical explanations, ranging from the simple to the more complex ideas about the sub-atomic level. I wasn't sure how he ended up with free will in the final chapter. Still, it was his choice I suppose.

[Lee Meng · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read half the book and find myself disagreeing with some of the points made by the author.

He defines classical randomness as an event or experiment which has well defined outcomes, such as that of a lottery. Fair enough. However, he attributes the success of popular books such as "Harry Potter" as truly random. I disagree. He also talks about an example where a big boulder balancing on an edge, with village on either side of it, and if you were to move 1cm to the left or right, that is going to smash into the village. He argues that it is unlikely that we can get to this accuracy and hence it is truly random. I disagree. He then talks about the interaction between 3 planets and we will never be able to predict how the movement of one is going to affect the other. I disagree.

In my opinion, you cannot define something as "more than random" just because you do not have the ability or knowledge to predict it. Take the Harry Potter example. Just because we cannot understand what are the factors that propel Harry Potter to fame, does not mean it is truly random. We just do not have the information to attribute a certain probability to an outcome. In essence, if we are able to define the event, regardless of how intricate and complex it is, and define all the possible outcomes, then things are not, using his words, "more than random".

Apart from this, his examples and arguments seem to contradict each other a little.

Disclaimer: I stopped at page 100, so maybe there are better things at the end.