Leonard Mlodinow has impressive credentials. More than impressive: highly intimidating. With physicist Stephen Hawking he co-wrote A Briefer History of Time. That's intimidating enough. Mlodinow also is a Doctor of physics, was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and teaches "randomness" to students at Cal Tech.

Cal Tech is where the guys in my high school went with their slide rules and their geeky pocket protectors. I didn't go there. I had to take Geometry I twice in order to pass. I never did figure out how anything could be plus and minus at the same time, and I blew spitballs at the overhead lights whenever a teacher uttered the word "algebra" (or turned her back, whichever came first.)

When my wife wants some money out of my wallet, which happens more often than you'd think, I have to multiply the bills on my handy calculator to be sure I'm giving correct change. Life is like that for the numerically challenged.

All this of course makes me just the wrong customer for Leonard Mlodinow's latest book The Drunkard's Walk, How Randomness Rules Our Lives. Yet I enjoyed reading it. I skipped around more or less at random, kind of a personal Drunkard's Walk.

For those lucky persons able to follow closely reasoned mathematical proof, the proofs are there. For the rest of us, The Drunkard's Walk explains a lot about life, and tells great stories.

Take the power of expectations, for example. Mlodinow writes, "We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see... That's why although there is sometimes little difference in ability between a wildly successful person and one who is not as successful, there is usually a big difference in how they are viewed."

In one experiment eight volunteers showed up at various hospitals complaining of hearing strange voices. All were admitted, and diagnosed as schizophrenic (one was diagnosed with manic-depressive psychosis). All eight were perfectly normal, but when they "ceased simulating any symptoms of abnormality and reported that the voices were gone" their lack of symptoms was interpreted by hospital staff "through the lens of insanity."

Writing in a journal was viewed as "patient engages in writing behavior." Arriving early for the cafeteria was seen as "a symptom of insanity."

Errors of perception are everywhere, just one of the phenomena Mlodinow is concerned to correct. Highly placed executives, or politicians, are praised or blamed for results they do not control. The odds that DNA evidence is accurate are wildly overestimated in court. Marilyn vos Savant, the author of the "Ask Marilyn" column, was castigated for years by readers and by mathematicians after she correctly answered a perplexing question about randomness. She was right and they were wrong, but they were certain they were right and she was wrong. But they were wrong.

The Drunkard's Walk is a lot of fun. Paying attention to and understanding the supporting math would be tantamount to taking an entry level course in statistics and probability. But you don't have to do that.

"I wrote this book in the belief that we can reorganize our thinking in the face of uncertainty," Mlodinow writes. "...Our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions... It is easy to believe that ideas that worked were good ideas, that plans that succeeded were well-designed... And it is easy to make heroes out of the most successful and to glance with disdain at the least. But ability does not guarantee achievement, nor is achievement proportional to ability. And so it is important to always keep in mind the other term in the equation, the role of chance."

Aired Sunday June 8, 2008 at 10:55 am and Wednesday June 11, 2008 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

The Drunkard's Walk, How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow. Pantheon Books hardcover $24.95. ISBN 9780375424045.

A Briefer History of Time (revised edition) by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Bantam Books paperback $18.00. ISBN 9780553-385465.

Our readers respond:

Tony,

The coincidences between WOB and my bookselling life never cease to amaze me. Some very loyal customers from Oroville came into the store today. When they were about to leave, we chatted for a while about their house, their vegetable garden and fruit trees, and the books they had discovered on our shelves. One of them was THE DRUNKARD'S WALK. This conversation took place at around 5pm today. After we said our goodbyes, I walked back to my desk and caught up on my email. I saved WOB for last. When I read it, I couldn't stop shaking my head in disbelief. It is now 5:55pm.

Dude, you're blowing my mind.

Please don't tell me that you're going to read SLAM (Nick Hornby) this weekend.

Paul Takushi
Tradebooks
UC Davis Bookstore

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From Leonard Mlodinow, author of The Drunkard's Walk:

hi tony - thank you so much for the validation! The book was a ton of work and a work of love, and it is great to hear someone like you be so enthusiastic about it...

So glad you enjoyed the book. My name is often pronounced rather randomly... for the radio i try to pronounce it like this: MLAH-di-now which is as close to the way it is spelled as i can manage!

Len

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