Littlewood's law

Littlewood's Law states that an individual can expect to experience "miracles" at the rate of about one per month.

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 be either exceptional or unexceptional (for instance, seeing the computer screen, the keyboard, the mouse, this 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 about one million events. Accepting this definition of a miracle, one can expect to observe one miraculous event for every 35 days' time, on average – and therefore, according to this reasoning, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.

See also

• Coincidence
• Confirmation bias
• Law of Truly Large Numbers
• Adages named after people
• Synchronicity

References

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.