Beyond Coincidence (15 page)

Mathematician Ian Stewart of the UK has studied the phenomenon of coincidence. He remains skeptical that the explanation for seemingly impossible chance events lies outside the realm of the laws of probability. He thinks people who assume something paranormal is going on are failing to grasp the facts.

Was it possible, then, to come up with a coincidence story that Ian Stewart could not explain in purely mathematical terms? Professor Stewart was prepared to rise to the challenge. Game on.

Martin Plimmer had been on vacation with his wife and children and they were playing a coin-tossing game, guessing heads or tails. His wife guessed heads or tails correctly seventeen consecutive times. Was that just coincidence?

Professor Stewart was dismissive. “Think about it mathematically. We assume heads and tails are equally likely … one half times one half seventeen times, that's going to be about … 1 in 100,000 probability. This is fairly unusual. Something like that happened to me once. It's just a 1 in 100,000 chance. Occasionally you get lucky.”

That was rather disappointing. Martin's wife hadn't, in some mysterious way, influenced the fall of the coin, or some how “read” how it had landed or attained a rare level of cosmic harmony with her children. She'd just been lucky.

For a really time-consuming holiday distraction she should have tried to flip a coin so it landed heads fifty times consecutively. Apparently to achieve this would take a million men tossing coins ten times a minute, forty hours a week—and even then it would happen only once every nine centuries. But it would happen. And the men could then, presumably, go home.

What did Ian Stewart make of the following coincidence?

At the 1997 Spanish Grand Prix, three racing drivers, Michael Schumacher, Jacques Villeneuve, and Heinz-Harold Frentzen, all lapped in exactly 1 minute 21.072 seconds. Was this not, as the astonished commentators suggested at the time, an extraordinary coincidence?

Again, Professor Stewart was not impressed. “The top drivers all lap at roughly the same speed, so it's reasonable to assume that the three fastest times would fall inside the same tenth-of-a-second period. At intervals of a thousandth of a second, there are one hundred possible lap times for each to choose from. Assume for simplicity that each time in that range is equally likely. Then there is a 1 in 100 chance that the second driver laps in the same time as the first, and a 1 in 100 chance that the third laps in the same time as the other two—which leads to an estimate of 1 in 10,000 as the probability of the coincidence. Low enough to be striking, but not so low that we ought to feel truly amazed. It's roughly as likely as a hole in one in golf.”

A man riding a moped in Bermuda was killed in a collision with a taxi, exactly a year after his brother had been killed—on the same street, by the same taxi driver, carrying the same passenger, and on the very same moped.

“This is another one where the chances are low, but the circumstances conspire to make it happen,” says Stewart. “The brother was using the same moped, so he obviously wasn't superstitious. It was probably a dangerous street. The taxi driver obviously was not a good driver. This experiment is carried out millions of times every year. You don't hear stories about someone being killed by a different taxi driver. This kind of event is very unlikely, but every so often it will happen.”

It was time for Martin Plimmer to unleash his “killer” story.

Martin had taken his six-year-old son to the doctor for a small operation. When the nurse administered an injection, Martin fainted—hitting his head as he fell. The hospital insisted he have an X ray. He arrived at the department and was told to wait. On the table in front of him was a four-year-old magazine—open at an article he had written—on the subject of headaches.

“That's a good one.” said Professor Stewart. “It's surprising and unusual. Things like that don't happen to you very often, which is why we find coincidences striking. Given all the factors involved, the odds against it happening must be in the region of a 1,000,000 to 1. But how many things happen to you in a day? A thousand things? At least. Over three years … a thousand days of a thousand things a day, a million things happen to you. In among those there will be one whose chances are one in a million. So about once every three years something like that ought to happen to you. If it's happening to you more often than that, then it is getting interesting mathematically.”

Professor Stewart says the reason we tend to be so amazed when these coincidences occur is not simply because they occur—but because they happen to us. “Of all the people in the world it could have happened to, it happened to you. The Universe picked you. And there's no explanation for that.”

He adds that our intuition is worse than useless when we think about coincidences. “We're amazed when we bump into friends in unusual places, because we expect random events to be evenly distributed—so statistical clumps surprise us. We think that a ‘typical' draw in a lottery is something like 5, 14, 27, 36, 39, 45—but that 1, 2, 3, 19, 20, 21 is far less likely. In fact these two sets of numbers have the same probability—1 in 13,983,815. Sequences of six random numbers are more likely to be clumpy than not.”

What then did Professor Stewart make of one of the most famous of all coincidence stories—that which connects the lives and deaths of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy?

Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846. Kennedy was elected in 1946. Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Kennedy in 1960. Their surnames each contain seven letters. Both were concerned with civil rights. Both were shot on a Friday. Both were shot in the head. Both were assassinated by men with three names comprising fifteen letters. John Wilkes Booth who assassinated Lincoln was born in 1839. Lee Harvey Oswald who assassinated Kennedy was born in 1939. It goes on and on.…

“If you just take the list of things, it sounds like a very unlikely chain of events. But it's numerology. People are looking for the things that are the same and ignoring all the things that are different. You focus on the fact that some names have the same number of letters but other names don't. How many letters on average would three names have? Well fifteen is probably close to average. The fact that they were born one hundred years apart means their careers are likely to track each other roughly one hundred years apart. Both were shot on a Friday—well there is a 1 in 7 chance.

“If you play these games and look for similarities and are prepared to be imaginative about what you look for and only count the things that are similar, I suspect you can take any two people on the planet and find an amazing amount of things in common.

“The fact is that they are both human beings, which means they have a lot in common to start with. You just have to find out what it is.”

And there is evidence to back him up on that. Awhile back
The Skeptical Inquirer
held a competition to find “amazing coincidences” between other world leaders. The winning entry unearthed sixteen uncanny similarities between Kennedy and President Alvaro Obregon of Mexico.

Arthur Koestler suggested that a possible explanation for coincidences is that like things in the universe may be attracted to each other. Did Ian Stewart have any sympathy with that view?

“There is a sense in which that is true,” said Professor Stewart. “But for obvious reasons. People who travel by aircraft a lot will be attracted to one another in airports. It's not a surprise if lots of coincidences happen to me in airports, because I spend a lot of time in them.

“As regards a more mystic kind of attraction of like things, I'm not convinced. Some people suggest that there is a secret hidden order to the universe and it is our job as scientists to work it out. But that kind of unity in the universe is on such a deep level—of fundamental particles all obeying the same rules—that it does not translate into anything meaningful on the level of people in terms of an obvious association of like with like.…”

And then suddenly, and unexpectedly, a chink appeared in the mathematician's armored skepticism about the existence of some sort of synchronistic force that creates coincidences.

“… but on the other hand I wouldn't say it was nonsense. I mean the universe is a very strange place and it does function in ways we don't understand very well.”

Did this mean that it was, after all, possible to think of a coincidence scenario that Professor Stewart could not dismiss as the result of pure chance—that was “beyond coincidence”?

“The place where I lose confidence in my explanations,” he said, “is when I get to the point when I'm not explaining—but explaining away.”

What, for example, if we were talking about meteorites and one landed on a nearby building? Could he explain that away?

“I don't think I could. It would be very difficult. At the very least it would be a remarkable thing—an astonishing thing.”

And what about the chances of actually being struck by a meteorite?

The chances, he reckoned, were astronomically slim. The only known instance was in 1954 when a nine-pound meteorite crashed through the roof of Ann Hodges's home in Sylacauga, Alabama, and struck her in the hip as she slept on a couch. She escaped with a large bruise.

So did Ian Stewart think it was safe to leave the building?

“Well, the problem is you just don't know. You could go somewhere else and that turns out to be the place that gets hit.”

You'll never guess what happened when we walked out of the building …

Nothing.

Two

C
OINCIDENCE ON THE
R
AMPAGE

1

IT'S A SMALL WORLD

When coincidence taps us on the shoulder in the form of an old friend in a strange place, we marvel at what a small world we live in.

Everyone agrees that the invention of the airplane has made the world an even smaller place. Not so small you could put it in your pocket, perhaps, but small enough to travel halfway around the world in the time it takes to watch half a dozen bad movies.

In fact the world has remained resolutely the same size (7,925 miles in diameter at the equator the last anyone checked), give or take a few quarters of an inch for natural shrinkage. And that's pretty big really, though not as big as Jupiter, of course, which is one thousand times greater in volume. If coincidences occur in direct proportion to the smallness of the planet, then presumably they occur one thousand times less frequently on Jupiter. Someone should look into that.

Anyway, here on Earth, jets certainly enable us to get about a lot more and therefore increase our potential for experiencing coincidences. Our forebears did not have the glorious blessing of package tours to Disneyworld. Their coincidence potential was restricted to the environs of their village or, as this old joke has it, the local bar:

A man stumbles up to the only other patron in a bar and asks if he can buy him a drink. “Why, of course,” comes the reply.

The first man then asks; “Where are you from?”

“I'm from Ireland,” replies the second man.

The first man responds, “You don't say, I'm from Ireland, too! Let's have another round and drink to Ireland.”

“Of course,” replies the second man.

“I'm curious,” the first man then asks, “Where in Ireland are you from?”

“Dublin,” comes the reply.

“I can't believe it,” says the first man. “I'm from Dublin, too! Let's have another, and drink to Dublin.”

“Of course,” replies the second man.

After a while the first man asks, “What school did you go to?”

“Saint Mary's,” replies the second man, “I graduated in '62.”

“This is unbelievable!” the first man says. “I went to Saint Mary's and I graduated in '62, too!”

Another customer enters the bar. “What's been going on?” he asks the bartender.

“Nothing much,” replies the bartender. “The O'Reilly twins are drunk again.”

Neither alcohol nor the miracle of modern aviation can account for many of the extraordinary stories that fall into the “small world effect” category of coincidences. Let's look in a little more detail at the story of the two Laura Buxtons.

In June 2001, ten-year-old Laura Buxton was at a party where she wrote her name and address on a luggage label, attached it to a helium balloon and released it into a clear blue sky.

The balloon floated 140 miles until finally coming to rest in the garden of another Laura Buxton, aged ten.

The second Laura immediately got in touch with the first Laura and the girls have since become friends. They've discovered that not only do they share the same name and are the same age, they are both fair haired, and each owns a black Labrador, a guinea pig, and a rabbit.

Now you may not get that sort of thing happening on Jupiter. But Earth is clearly a very small place—as these following stories confirm.

D
ÉJÀ
-V
ICKY

R. T. Kallidusjian's ears pricked up when a stranger at a dinner party mentioned that his first wife was called Vicky Bigden. Vicky Bigden was his first girlfriend. Subsequent conversation revealed that the first man had married Vicky at the same time (2 p.m.) on the same day (Saturday July 11, 1964) as Kallidusjian had married his first wife. Both couples attended the Antibes Jazz Festival later that summer.

T
HE
P
OIGNANT
P
OSTCARD

When James Wilson's father died in South Africa in the 1960s James was on holiday in Spain. He cut short the holiday and made arrangements to fly to South Africa, via the Canary Islands, where he joined up with his brother-in-law in order to continue the journey together. While in the Canaries airport they bought a postcard to send to James's sister in Holland. The picture showed people walking on a beach. One of the people was James's father.