Maria Goeppert was a German physicist. She received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for the discovery of nuclear orbital structure.

She graduated in 1930 using in her thesis the calculus of probabilities to analyse the orbit of the electron.

We are going to study the random experiment that consists of throwing a thumbtack and observing if it lands “point up” or “point down”.

a)    Which of the two outcomes do you think is more likely to occur?

b)    Check if what you have thought is correct by throwing 100 thumbtacks (or one thumbtack 100 times) and complete the following table.

c)    Having performed the experiment, which of the two outcomes do you now think is more likely to occur?

d)    We are going to share the results obtained by the whole class, filling in the following table.

e)    What value do the relative frequencies (rf) of each of the outcomes approach as the number of trials of the randomized experiment increases?

f)      What could we say is, approximately, the probability of each of the events in this random experiment?