George Rebane
This mildly technical posting is intended for those concerned with the use of R-G Theory to predict the termination (and continuance) of minimally known processes (MKPs). As initially posted in these pages and subsequently expanded, I extended Richard Gott’s seminal work that applied the Copernican perspective to calculating the probability of longevity for the human species (here). R-G Theory now enables such probabilistic calculations for both continuous and discrete event ongoing MKPs known only by their age or lifetime.
We all run into many MKPs in our daily round. These range from stock market trends through the arrival of a delivery to successful observations of periodic or repeating events. The basic question answered is ‘Given only the age or lifetime of an ongoing process, what is the probability that it will terminate in a specified future time interval?’ A classic example used here is, ‘The Old Faithful Geyser has been erupting for 11,000 years, what is the probability that it will cease eruptions in the next year? the next ten years? or even between 13 February 2081 and 22 October 2119?
The present addition to R-G introduced here involves the calculation of the reliability (or error distribution) of the calculated probabilities, given the assumed/measured uncertainties in the age or longevity of the MKP in question. The detailed technical dissertation that provides these answers is introduced in ‘R-G Theory Propagation of Error’ (Download R-G Error Prop) which references the technical development in TN2011-2: R-G Error Propagation (Download TN2011-2_R-GerrorPropagation).
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