THE AMBIGUITY OF RANDOM CHOICES - PROBABILITY PARADOXES IN SOME PHYSICAL PROCESSES

Intriguing problems whose solutions seem to run counter to intuition a re sometimes discussed theoretically in probability textbooks; under c lose scrutiny, they often appear to originate from an incomplete speci fication of the sampling procedures. Interest in these oddities is not purely academic; the world of real point processes (with its multitud e of applications in science and engineering) exhibits its own ''parad oxes'' that follow from certain ambiguities in the random choice of an event. The paper discusses some probabilistic subtleties that can be easily illustrated by ordinary demonstration experiments in the physic s laboratory. (C) 1996 American Association of Physics Teachers.