This article was taken from the July 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
When ten-year-old Laura Buxton released a balloon with a message asking the finder to write to her, the response came from another Laura Buxton 225km away. John Ironmonger's new novel, The Coincidence Authority, published around the same time as my book describing a theoretical basis for coincidences and other highly improbable events, featured a London-based professor studying coincidences. And his birthday was on June 30, the same as mine.
The family of my friend, catastrophist Gordon Woo, had no connection with Singapore. His parents had never visited the country and had no contact with anyone there. All the more extraordinary then when, during a 2013 visit to the Chinese Heritage Centre at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore,Gordon spotted a 1944 photograph of his father on the wall.
It would be a brave person who dismissed these as mere chance events, denying that there is some deeper implication in them. It certainly looks as if the Universe is trying to tell us something that we are just not quite getting. Or perhaps an external force is manipulating us to bring such strange events about.
The advance of human understanding is littered with similar situations: curious regularities in nature that we couldn't quite explain. Until someone -- perhaps a Newton, a Darwin or an Einstein -- came along and described how things worked, so that the previously puzzling regularities made perfect sense. Tying up mysterious phenomena with a single explanatory idea: gravity unifying the orbits of the planets about the Sun; the fall of the apple and the formation of stars; evolution creating the abundance of species on the Earth; the existence of fossils; and peculiarities of human behaviour.
The same is true of coincidences -- like those mentioned earlier. Coincidences can be described, explained and even be seen to be expected, using the laws of chance coupled with human motivations and desires. This is not an original observation, but it bears repeating, not least because of the resistance it encounters.
I find it convenient to describe how chance explains extraordinarily unlikely events through a set of laws, which, together, I call the improbability principle. These laws show how we underestimate the chance of coincidences, fail to take account of the fundamental asymmetry of chance events following from the fact that time moves forward, fail to allow for selection bias in our calculations and simply have inadequate models of the world.
That's the mathematics of the improbability principle. But the maths is not the end of the story. In fact, to complete the theory, one might accurately describe coincidences as "part human".
Although coincidences appear to occur in the external world, in fact they're not so objective: without you they wouldn't exist. The Universe is a booming, buzzing confusion of events. Uncountable things are happening around us all the time. And we ignore almost all of them. We have to -- or we'd be overwhelmed. So what is it that makes us pay attention to some events, but not to most? It's simply that some of them have significance for us. So their relevance draws our attention, and we notice them, not even being aware of all the trillions of other things going on.
So, one might in fact say that coincidences do have deep meaning. But it isn't the universe trying to tell us something, or something manipulating our lives. Rather, it is something we impose on the Universe -- just as we impose interpretations on the positions of the stars in the heavens, and faces and other shapes on clouds.
And that's the improbability principle: highly improbable events are commonplace. They're just a consequence of the mathematics of chance coupled with the psychology of humans.
David J Hand is senior research investigator and emeritus professor of mathematics at Imperial College, London. His book, The Improbability Principle (Scientific American), is out now
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
