A probability measure is a nonnegative, countably additive measure with total mass one. Thus , and for pairwise disjoint events ,The complement of an event has probability . The probability of a union of overlapping events needs a correction: . Counting the overlap once is the simplest instance of the inclusion-exclusion principle.
A zero-probability event need not be impossible as a member of the sample space. Under the continuous uniform distribution on , every individual point has probability zero, while the whole interval has probability one. Countable additivity applies to countable unions, not arbitrary uncountable ones; there is no contradiction.
New to topics? Read the docs here!