Why cant probabilities be negative

Log in. Math and Arithmetic. Study now. See Answer. Best Answer. Study guides. Algebra 20 cards. A polynomial of degree zero is a constant term. The grouping method of factoring can still be used when only some of the terms share a common factor A True B False. The sum or difference of p and q is the of the x-term in the trinomial. A number a power of a variable or a product of the two is a monomial while a polynomial is the of monomials.

J's study guide 1 card. What is the name of Steve on minecraft's name. Steel Tip Darts Out Chart 96 cards. Q: Why can't probability be negative? Write your answer Related questions. Why cant a negative fraction represent a probability? Can Does a negative z score yield a negative probability value? Can probability values be negative? Can probability be negative? When cant you have theoretical probability? Can probability outcomes be expressed as negative integer's? Can the expected value of a discrete probability distribution be negative?

Can a probability of some event be negative? What is the probability of winning at Blackjack? Can the experimental probability of an event be a negative number.

Can a probability assume a negative value? Can probabilty be negative? Active 3 years, 7 months ago. Viewed 1k times. Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. In other words Richard Feynman's : It is not my intention here to contend that the final probability of a verifiable physical event can be negative. I'm quoting this from the answer you pointed: As a final remark, whuber is absolutely right that it isn't really legal to call anything a probability that doesn't lie in [0,1], at the very least, not for the time being.

Improve this answer. Benoit Sanchez Benoit Sanchez 7, 20 20 silver badges 43 43 bronze badges. There are complex amplitudes, but probabilities are given by the squared absolute values of these amplitudes, i.

Your email address that I had does not work anymore. If you read this, could you please get in touch with me? Thanks a lot. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Linked Related 3. So you can maybe think in terms of consecutively answering the three questions and penalising assignments that are inconsistent.

Imagine that we start in a state of complete ignorance. We then ask the three questions in succession and make corrections. We can think of this as adding a correction term to our previous state of ignorance:. Notice that the correction term has some negative probabilities in it!

But these seem relatively benign from an interpretational point of view — they are just removing probability from some cells so that it can be reassigned to others, and the final answer is still positive. Next, we add on two more correction terms, one for each of the remaining two questions. The correction term for the second question needs to remove probability from the bottom row and add it to the top row, and the one for the third question corrects the diagonals:. So the system is definitely in the top left state, which is what we found before.

As an example, say you have a 0. Then you add 0. More usually, you will have partial information about all three questions, with a constraint that the total information you get about the system is at most half the total possible information, in a specific technical sense. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account.

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