Physics has been around since Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and before, depending on whom and how you count. Chemistry has been around since Merlin, a fiction of 1136. Statistics, especially modern statistics, has been around for about 120 years. No wonder it was slow to catch on in some quarters and still hasn't been accepted in others.One impediment to acceptance has been the reluctance to forgo determinism in favor of empiricism. When Newton broke down light into its color component parts and when he studied the music of the spheres, he thought in terms of absolutes-orbits can be measured and predicted to the nearest nano. Evidence is that Copernicus (1473-1547) and Galileo (1564-1642) thought the same: no room for variation.
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