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Notes
- 1.
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Bantam Books, New York, 1974, p. 200.
- 2.
The Elementary Particles, by Michele Houellebecq, translated from the French by Frank Wynne, Knopf, New York, 2000, p. 103. This is translated from Les particules élémentaires, Flammarion, Paris, 1998.
- 3.
Pynchon, op. cit., p. 355.
- 4.
R. D. Clarke, Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, Vol. 72, 1946, p. 481. I am grateful to the librarian of the Fine Hall library at Princeton for supplying me with this document.
- 5.
The book is available in a modern replica, Elibron Classics, 2003. Poissons' preface is very interesting. He explains his concern about the judicial system and where he got his numbers. The approximation now known as the “Poisson distribution” is introduced with no fanfare on p. 41.
- 6.
For the mathematically oriented this sum is given by 576e−m(1 + m + m2/2! + m3/3! + ⋯). The sum in brackets, which is a sum over no hits, one hit, two hits, and so on, adds up to the exponential e m, which then cancels the exponential e −m, leaving the 576 as advertised.
- 7.
Pynchon, op. cit., p. 64.
- 8.
The essay can be found in Bell's collection Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987.
- 9.
This quote can be found in M. Jammer, The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, Wiley, New York, p. 204.
- 10.
Houellebecq, op. cit., p. 103.
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(2008). Rocket Science. In: Physicists on Wall Street and Other Essays on Science and Society. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-76506-8_13
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