Preprint, April 2020
Vadim Biktashev and Ian Melbourne
Abstract
It is known that quasiperiodic hypermeander of spiral waves almost certainly produces a bounded trajectory for the spiral tip. We analyse the size of this trajectory. We show that this deterministic question does not have a physically sensible deterministic answer and requires probabilistic treatment. In probabilistic terms, the size of the hypermeander trajectory proves to have an infinite expectation, despite being finite with probability one. This can be viewed as a physical manifestation of the classical "St. Petersburg paradox" from probability theory and economics.