Along with flaws in our visual perception, we also have inherent flaws in our logical perception. How many coincidences or 'miracles' do we see in our day to day lives that can be explained logically? I caught sight of a recent review in the NYRB below that explains 'Littlewood's Law', which attempts to explain these logical mis-perceptions. The review is by the physicist Freeman Dyson. His book Disturbing the Universe, is a good read. To get a more complete view of the arguments being made below read the complete review, or the book reviewed. See also.
Complete Review Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, Other Pseudoscience, Reviewed by Freeman Dyson by Georges Charpak and Henri Broch, translated from the French by Bart K. Holland, Johns Hopkins University Press, 176 pp.... Littlewood's Law of Miracles states that in the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month. The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month. Broch tells stories of some amazing coincidences that happened to him and his friends, all of them easily explained as consequences of Littlewood's Law ...
[Update ... I borrowed the above book from the library, and read it. While I liked the contents of the review, the book itself is uneven in depth, strangely translated and just not very good. And this is a topic I like. Not recommended ]
There's another great article about this by Michael Shermer, of Skeptic.com fame, that was in Scientific American recently. This link may or may not actually work: http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=00094511-E068-10FA-89FB83414B7F0000
If that fails, it was the July 26th issue!
Posted by: Robin | September 07, 2004 at 06:43 PM