Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [211]
42. This point is also addressed, for example, in J. D. Graham and J. B. Wiener, Risk vs. Risk: Tradeoffs in Protecting Health and Environment (Harvard University Press, 1995), especially Chapter 11.
43. See also, for example, Slovic, Paul. “Perception of Risk,” Science 236, 280–285, no. 4799 (1987). Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman, “Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability,” Cognitive Psychology 5 (1973): 207–232. Sunstein, Cass R., and Timur Kuran. “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation,” Stanford Law Review 51 (1999):683–768. Slovic, Paul “If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act: Psychic Numbing and Genocide,” Judgment and Decision Making 2, no. 2 (2007): 79–95.
44. See also, for example, Kousky, Carolyn, and Roger Cooke. The Unholy Trinity: Fat Tails, Tail Dependence, and Micro-Correlations, RFF Discussion Paper 09-36-REV (November 2009). Kunreuther, Howard, and M. Useem. Learning from Catastrophes: Strategies for Reaction and Response (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing). Kunreuther, Howard. Reflections and Guiding Principles for Dealing with Societal Risks, in The Irrational Economist: Overcoming Irrational Decisions in a Dangerous World, E. Michel-Kerjan and P. Slovic, eds., New York Public Affairs Books 2010. Weitzman, Martin L., On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change, Review of Economics and Statistics, 2009.
45. See, for example, Joe Nocera’s cover story on “Risk Mismanagement” in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, January 4, 2009.
46. The problem of irreversibility has been addressed by some economists, including Arrow, Kenneth J., and Anthony C. Fisher, “Environmental Preservation, Uncertainty, and Irreversibility,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 88 (1974): 312–319. Gollier, Christian, and Nicolas Treich, “Decision Making under Uncertainty: The Economics of the Precautionary Principle,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 27, no. 7 (2003). Wiener, Jonathan B. “Global Environmental Regulation,” Yale Law Journal 108 (1999): 677–800.
47. E.g., Richard Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response (Oxford University Press, 2004).
48. Leonhardt, David. “The Fed Missed This Bubble: Will It See a New One?” New York Times, January 5, 2010.
49. In this book, I use the term “systematic uncertainty,” rather than the more commonly used term “systematic error.” Errors are often associated with mistakes, whereas uncertainty refers to the inevitable level of imprecision, given your apparatus.
50. Again, people commonly use the term statistical error to refer to an uncertain measurement due to finite statistics.
51. Kristof, Nicholas. “New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer,” New York Times, May 6, 2010.
52. This quote has also been attributed to Robert Storm Peterson and Niels Bohr.
53. This table includes separate entries for left- and right-handed particles. These particles are distinguished by their chirality, which for massless particles tells the spin along the direction of motion. Masses mix the two—such as a left-and right-handed electron. The precise distinguishing feature is less important for this table than the difference in their interactions. If all particles were massless, the weak force that changed up-type into down-type quarks and charged into neutral leptons would act only on left-handed particles. The strong and electromagnetic forces, on the other hand, act on both, with only the quarks charged under the strong force.
54. The three types of neutrinos get paired via the weak force with the three charged leptons. However, once they are produced, neutrinos can oscillate into each other, no longer remaining identified solely by the charged lepton with which they are paired. The neutrinos will sometimes be labeled simply with numbers to refer to their relative mass and sometimes with labels referring to the charged lepton according to the context.
55. If the initial b meson is neutral, you instead see a track that originates from the decay