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Blaise Pascal: Theories
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On September 19, 1648, after many months of Pascal's friendly but insistent prodding, Florin Périer, husband of Pascal's elder sister Gilberte, was finally to carry out the fact finding mission vital to Pascal's theory. The account, written by Périer, reads:
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From these possibilities, and the principles of statistics, Pascal deduced that it would be better to believe in God unconditionally. It is a classic application of "game theory" to itemize options and payoffs and is valid within its assumptions.
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In this context, Pascal argued as follows. There are three types of hypothesis. The negation of some hypotheses implies an absurd consequence, and they must therefore be true. The affirmation of others implies an absurdity, and these must be false. In a third category, if no absurd conclusion results from either the affirmation or negation of an hypothesis, no conclusion may be drawn about its truth. This classification of possible outcomes assumed that the logic of scientific theories could be modelled on mathematical proofs.
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Particularly of interest to Pascal was a work of Desargues on conic sections. Following Desargues's thinking, the sixteen-year-old Pascal produced, as a means of proof, a short treatise on what was called the "Mystic Hexagram", Essai pour les coniques ("Essay on Conics") and sent it—his first serious work of mathematics—to Père Mersenne in Paris; it is known still today as Pascal's theorem. Briefly, it can be explained ...:
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