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EspañolLITTLEWOOD'S LAW
'Littlewood's Law' states that individuals can expect a miracle to happen to them at the rate of about one per month.
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.
Littlewood's law, making certain suppositions, is explained as follows: a miracle is defined as an exceptional event of special significance occurring at a frequency of one in a million; during the hours in which a human is awake and alert, a human will experience one thing per second (for instance, seeing the computer screen, the keyboard, the mouse, the article, etc.); additionally, a human is alert for about eight hours per day; and as a result, a human will, in 35 days, have experienced, under these suppositions, 1,008,000 things. 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.
★ ''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
★ Coincidence
★ Contingency
★ Confirmation bias
★ Adages named after people
★ Synchronicity
★ 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.
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.
Littlewood's law, making certain suppositions, is explained as follows: a miracle is defined as an exceptional event of special significance occurring at a frequency of one in a million; during the hours in which a human is awake and alert, a human will experience one thing per second (for instance, seeing the computer screen, the keyboard, the mouse, the article, etc.); additionally, a human is alert for about eight hours per day; and as a result, a human will, in 35 days, have experienced, under these suppositions, 1,008,000 things. 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.
| Contents |
| References |
| See also |
| External links |
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
★ 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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