Littlewood's Law states that individuals can expect a "miracle" to happen to them at the rate of about one per month.
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History
The law was framed by Cambridge University Professor J. E. Littlewood, and published in a collection of his work, A Mathematician's Miscellany; it seeks (among other things) to debunk one element of supposed supernatural phenomenology and is related to the more general Law of Truly Large Numbers, which states that with a sample size large enough, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.
Description
Littlewood defines a miracle as an exceptional event of special significance occurring at a frequency of one in a million. He assumes that during the hours in which a human is awake and alert, a human will experience one event per second, which may either be exceptional or unexceptional (for instance, seeing the computer screen, the keyboard, the mouse, the article, etc.). Additionally, Littlewood supposes that a human is alert for about eight hours per day.
As a result, a human will, in 35 days, have experienced, under these suppositions, 1,008,000 events. Accepting this definition of a miracle, one can be expected to observe one miraculous occurrence within the passing of every 35 consecutive days – and therefore, according to this reasoning, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.
References
- Littlewood's Miscellany, edited by B. Bollobás, Cambridge University Press; 1986. ISBN 0-521-33702-X
- Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, Other Pseudoscience, Georges Charpak and Henri Broch, translated from the French by Bart K. Holland, Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-7867-5
See also
- Coincidence
- Contingency
- Confirmation bias
- Law of Truly Large Numbers
- Adages named after people
- Synchronicity
External links
- Littlewood's Law described in a review of Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, Other Pseudoscience by Freeman J. Dyson, in the New York Review of Books. Full article requires purchase.
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