Probabilitymeasuring maybe
Chance becomes a number between 0 and 1 — and suddenly you can do arithmetic with maybe.
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Three claims about tomorrow. The sun will rise. This coin toss lands heads. A dinosaur walks into class. Each is a maybe, but they are not equal maybes. So line them up by how likely they feel: the absurd one gets pushed to one end, the coin toss sits in the middle, and the sunrise crowds the other end. Better than a gut feeling, though, is a scale.
Probability is that scale, made precise: a number between zero and one. Zero means impossible — it cannot happen, ever. One means certain — it cannot fail. A fair coin lands heads half the time, so it sits at exactly one half, dead center between the two. Every maybe gets an address somewhere between impossible and certain.
Where do the numbers come from? Counting. Take a fair die: six faces, and fair means no face gets special treatment — every face is equally likely. So take one whole unit of certainty, a bar running from zero to one, and split it into six equal slices. Each face claims one slice: a probability of one sixth, about zero point one seven.
Now count every way the die can land. It has to land on some face — that much is certain. So the six slices together must cover the whole bar: one sixth, taken six times, is six sixths — exactly one. No gaps, no overlaps, nothing left over. Add up the probabilities of all the ways, and they always reach exactly one.
So chance stops being a feeling and becomes arithmetic. The dinosaur lands near zero, the coin at exactly one half, the sunrise close to one. Three gut feelings went in; three numbers came out — and numbers can be compared, added, calculated with. Probability is measurement, pointed at maybe.