Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience
• Skeptics & Atheists
From Freeman Dyson's review of Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience :
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.
The New York Review of Books: One in a million
Comments
Posted by: Susma Rio Sep | April 12, 2004 6:44 PM