Coincidence? I think not

Humans have an inner desire to believe in the supernatural. We tend to take our observations of small, peculiar events and quickly come to the conclusion that something supernatural is at play.

We have all heard stories, and perhaps all experienced events which seemed odd, and which involved a great deal of coincidence. For instance many people have experienced picking up the phone to call someone, while at the same time they are receiving a call from the same person. It happened to me before, and it is pretty freaky when, before the phone rang, I picked up to hear the person I was trying to call on other end. Others tell stories of times when they missed a plane, and something catastrophic happened to the plane. Some have a dream of a sick relative, and when they call to check up on them, they find that their dream was exact in every way. So are these stories true? I think so. But, I do not believe there’s a supernatural force behind all this but rather two main factors

1. Frequency

2. Selectivity

If we take the “dream example” and apply the so-called factors above, we get the following: We have dreams every night, so we are bound to dream something that relates to something actually happening in real life. Out of the hundreds of times we have dreams, and hundreds of times that we tell people our dreams, we take the one that matched and focus on that instance. That is, we select the instance that has worked and forget all the ones that didn’t.

Taking another example will reveal how much power numbers have over our common sense. Let’s say you want to find a pair of people with the same birthday. How many people would you need to get a 50/50 chance of finding a pair with the same birthday? Common sense says 183 would be more than enough, since there are 365 days in a year, and 183 is roughly one half of 365. But the answer is actually 23, and I’ve seen the number put to the test. A few years ago my math teacher tested this calculation in a class of 20 students, and we found a match!

Even more interesting is the “small world” phenomena that we all experienced. You are in a public place somewhere and you end up meeting someone, who knows someone you know! That is, a friend of a friend.

The following explains why so many of us experience the “small world” phenomena..

“Sociologists have found that individuals typically have around 150 people whom they regard as "close". Therefore each of us typically has an entourage of around 23,000 "friends of a friend". Say we have about five acquaintances for each close friend, the number swells to 600,000.”

I hope that by now, things are becoming easier to see. Many of what we call coincidences are actually random numbers at play. Coupled with our tendency to remember certain events and ignore others, it’s easy to see why such phenomena are experienced by everybody around us.

Before I finish this post, I wanted to leave you with this story, and leave you the argument open to you… phenomenon or numbers at work?

“When Sue Hamilton was working alone in her office in July 1992 when the fax machine broke down. Unable to fix it, she decided to call her colleague Jason Pegler, who had set off home a little earlier. Finding his home number pinned up on a notice board, she called him and began to explain the problem. But Jason quickly stopped her: "I'm not at home", he explained. "I just happened to be walking past this phone box when it rang, and I answered it!" .
The number Sue found on the notice board was not Jason's home number at all. It was his employee number - which was the same as the number of the phone box he was walking past when she called”

Sources: Laws of Freak Mathematics

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