This card depicts a miniature version of what is known as a Galton Board. Marbles which are dropped in at the top tend to fall into buckets with what looks like a Gaussian distribution, commonly known as a “bell curve”. In this case, each ball which is dropped in is considered as a single sample. Most marbles will fall in the middle, but a few will work their way to either edge. Each marble has the chance to be shunted left or right at each level. They fall like this because it is much more likely for a marble to have an equal number of left and right turns, than it is to have all left or all right turns.
In our quest to understand the world, we can interact with it in different ways and get a range of feedback.
The teaching of this card is that when we wish to understand how something works, we must try many, many times. A handful of attempts will not reveal the true nature of what is at hand (conversely, continuing to experiment long after we have a theory in hand yields diminishing returns).
Watch a Galton Board in action.
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