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July 7, 2006

Strange But True!

Q. When can you expect that next “miracle” to happen to you? On average, how many do you experience every month?

A. For this one, let's invoke “Littlewood's Law of Miracles,” from University of Cambridge mathematician John Littlewood. As explained by noted physicist Freeman Dyson and quoted by Michael Shermer of “Skeptic” magazine, “During the time we are awake and actively living our lives, roughly eight hours a day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one every second, or 30,000 per day, or a million every month.” That's a lot of life experiences coming at us, though with few exceptions, these are not even noteworthy or memorable. But then there are those one-in-a-million events, the stars in the sky, the random acts of human kindness... Call them what you will, they're the quintessence, what we live for. At one in a million, they're “the Miracles on Probability Street” (“Scientific American”), and they figure to happen to each of us an average of once every month.


 
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