CHANCE AND INFINITY.

Evening Star, Issue 22460, 3 October 1936, Page 21

CHANCE AND INFINITY.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —The noted scientist, Sir Jamei Jeans’, quotes Huxley as having said that in an infinity of time a number of monkeys set to strum unintelligently on as many typewriters would be bound in time to write ali the books in the British Museum, Dean Inge, in his * God and to® Astronomers,’ says: “ Does anyone sen-, ouslv believe that printers’ pie can ever be so shaken for Hamlet to emerge complete?” Maybe some of your readers can throw light upon this problem on which: the scientist and the cleric are at variance. Jeans, in illustrating the mathemathical laws of chance, says m effect that if a dozen half-pence are tossed in the air no one can say how many will fall heads or how many will fall tails, but that if 1,000,000 tons of halfpence are tossed up there can only be one result— namely, 500,000 tons of heads and 500,000 tons of tails. To my mind in an infinity of time there should be as much chance of 999,999 tons 2.2391 b of heads turning up to 11b of tails as for the timeless, tireless monkeys ever to type a Shakespearean sonnet. If we postulate an infinity of time I should say that Huxley is right and that the dean with his printers pie and Jeans with his half-pence art both wrong.—l am, etc., Kip. October 3.