Probability in Physics

Andy Lawrence is the Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), observational cosmology, survey astronomy, and e-science (the Virtual Observatory). He has been teaching an undergraduate course on Probability in Physics with a new angle. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and author of the Springer book Astronomical Measurement.

Part I: The Basics.- Randomness and Probability.- Distributions, Moments, and Errors.- Part II: Frequency Distributions in the Physical World.- Counting the Ways: Arrangements and Subsets.- Counting Statistics: Binomial and Poisson Distributions.- Combining Many Factors: The Gaussian Distribution.- Distributions Arising from Random Processes in Time.- Part III: Probabilistic Inference: Reasoning in the Presence of Uncertainty.- Hypothesis Testing.- Parameter Estimation.- Inference With Two Variables: Correlation Testing and Line Fitting.- Model Fitting.- Part IV: Selected Topics.- Information, Uncertainty, and Surprise.- Erratic Time Series.- Probability in Quantum Physics.- Entropy, Complexity, and the Arrow of Time.- Solutions.