How did I get to become a cell biologist? Or, more generally, why do things happen the way they do? The answer provided by the philosopher Democritus and later adopted by Jacques Monod is "everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity." While I read Monod's book Chance and Necessity as an undergraduate student, little did I appreciate the accuracy of this citation and...

In our day-to-day discourse on uncertainty, words like belief, chance, plausible, likelihood and probability are commonly encountered. Often, these words are used interchangeably, because they are intended to encapsulate some loosely articulated notions about the unknowns. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework that is able to show how each of these terms can be made precise, so th...