Littlewood's law
Littlewood's law states that a person can expect to experience events with odds of one in a million (referred to as a "miracle") at the rate of about one per month. It was framed by British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood.
History
The law was framed by Cambridge University Professor John Edensor Littlewood and published in a 1986 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 (in terms of probability model of single sample) thing is likely to happen.
Description
Littlewood defines a miracle as an exceptional event of special significance occurring at one in-a-million frequency. He assumes that during the hours a human is awake and alert, a human will see or hear one "event" per second, which may be either exceptional or unexceptional. Additionally, Littlewood supposes that a human is alert for about eight hours daily.
As a result, in 35 days, a human will have experienced about one million events under these suppositions. Therefore, accepting this definition of a miracle, one can expect to observe one miraculous event every 35 days, on average – therefore, according to this reasoning, seemingly miraculous events are commonplace.
See also
- Coincidence
- Confirmation bias
- Gambler's fallacy
- List of eponymous laws
- Micromort
- Orders of magnitude (probability)
- Spurious relationship
- Synchronicity
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
External links
- Littlewood's Law described in a review of Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, Other Pseudoscience by Freeman Dyson, in The New York Review of Books (Subscription content?)
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