Beyond Coincidence Read online

  American author Paul Auster is an enthusiastic modern advocate of coincidence as a structural or narrative device. He says, “We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence. Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second. People who do not like my work say the connections seem too arbitrary. But that is how life is.”

  And that’s how it was for British crime writer Ian Rankin—author of the Inspector Rebus crime novels—when he was invited to contribute to an obituary of novelist Anthony Powell who had just died. Powell was the author of the twelve-volume epic, A Dance to the Music of Time, which is packed with coincidence and synchronicity—school friends bump into one another after forty years; somebody will be thinking about a painting just before being introduced to the artist.

  Rankin had been introduced to the books by a friend at university who gave him the first three volumes as a birthday gift. Powell’s death prompted him to start reading the books again. He took the first couple of volumes with him on a trip to Harrogate for the annual conference of the Crime Writers’ Association.

  “Coincidence,” he says, “has dogged my writing career.” He published a novel about a “magic circle” of judges and lawyers, only to have the police in Edinburgh investigate a similar claim two years later. A year later, sitting in the south of France, he dreamed up a story idea about an alleged war criminal living quietly in Edinburgh, only to find that Scottish Television was making a documentary about a real war criminal living in the city.

  “More recently, I encountered a gentleman with the surname Rebus who lives in Edinburgh’s Rankin Drive, and a police officer with the exact same job title and surname as another character in one of my books.”

  At the Harrogate conference one speaker showed a slide of a truck that had lost control and smashed into the bedroom of a bungalow. The owner of the bungalow was sick that day and confined to bed. But the telephone had roused him from bed seconds before the truck toppled a wall onto the spot where he had been. The telephone call had been a wrong number.

  Rankin returned home on the Sunday evening and collapsed onto the sofa, reaching for the TV remote. As he channelsurfed, he saw a face he recognized. It was one of the contestants on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? “It was Alistair, an old friend—and he’d just won $225,000.”

  It wasn’t until Rankin was going to bed that he placed the final piece into the coincidence jigsaw. He remembered what else his friend had done. Years earlier, when they had been at university together, Alistair had given him a birthday present of three Anthony Powell books.…

  So why do we love coincidence? Is it because we are intuitively celebrating what Arthur Koestler called a universal principle that “things like to happen together”?

  Perhaps coincidence is fundamental to the human condition. We crave and need the patterns and rhythms and symmetry it provides. It brings respite from disorder. And perhaps our brains are hard-wired to both seek out and create synchronicity. We absolutely need doppelgängers and parallel universes in which alternative versions of ourselves live—only more successfully, of course.

  Mathematician Ian Stewart has studied coincidence. His scientist’s view of why we love it is more prosaic. “Well, it gives us great stories to tell at the bar,” he says.

  3

  IT’S A SMALL WORLD—COINCIDENCE AND CULTURE

  The oldest observed and most enchanting coincidence of nature has led wise men and children a merry dance down the ages to many and various inventive explanations. It is the fact that the Sun and the Moon appear equal in size in our sky. We know now it’s all a matter of perspective, but that’s only because clever people have told us so.

  The first clever people had very little reliable knowledge to build upon. The 6th-century-BC Greek philosopher Heraclitus estimated the Sun to be a foot in diameter. This would have made its distance from Earth around forty-four yards. It’s easy to say now, with the help of five minutes’ research on the Internet, that Heraclitus was wrong. We can even give him the figures: the Sun is 830,247 miles across, compared with 2085 miles for the Moon. The Sun’s diameter is four hundred times larger than the Moon’s. The Sun is also four hundred times farther away from us than the Moon. It is this relative distance that makes the two bodies equal in size in our perception.

  Given the apparent randomness of the cosmos and the vast distances involved, it is a truly remarkable coincidence that from our unique perspective the Sun and the Moon should appear the same. But coincidence is all it is, however potent the Sun and Moon’s symbolism in our lives and folklore as a complementary pair of equal opposites.

  What was magical in the past, however, doesn’t necessarily hold the same mystery for us now. On the other hand we are not immune to magical interpretations of newly perceived coincidences. In fact the evidence suggests that our tendency to opt for paranormal explanations is increasing. One reason is that we experience a lot more coincidences than people did in the past, and the frequency multiplies every year.

  Our ancestors lived in smaller communities than ours, traveled less frequently, less far, and were exposed to a narrower range of experiences. Opportunities for unlikely correlations in their lives were more limited. They made the most of those that came their way, often investing them with profound significance.

  Ostensibly the modern world is less superstitious, yet it is also a place in which seeming magic is more likely to happen. It’s a busy and bewildering place, growing ever busier and more bewildering. Within the last hundred years human society has accommodated several dynamic technological revolutions, each of which has transformed the pace and scope of individual experience. We now have mass mobility, mass communication, and mass access to computing power; and we have that inexhaustible information regurgitator, the Internet.

  The solemn maxim “know thyself,” written above the temple of the Ancient Greek oracle at Delphi, may be—as it ever was—more honored in the breach than in the observance, but now at least we seem to know everything else. There are billions of items of computer-sorted information at everybody’s fingertips, broadening our view but not necessarily our understanding.

  Profligacy of information makes the possibility of coincidence more likely. The statistician’s law of large numbers states that if the sample is very large even extremely unlikely things become likely. Well, the sample base we expose ourselves to every time we travel abroad or log on to the Internet is vast. “It’s a small world!” we exclaim, as the correlations come together. One thing is certain: the wider the World Wide Web, the smaller the world. Today we are wired for coincidence.

  But while our experience of coincidence has increased, our knowledge of probability hasn’t kept pace. Most of us have a better grasp of elementary mathematics than did the average American colonist, but the sheer volume and complexity of our experience of coincidence makes it harder than ever to sort out the fantastic from the mathematically feasible.

  That’s why the most consistent factor of reported coincidences is the insistence by their observers that they aren’t coincidences at all. They are brought about by angels, or magic, or sock goblins, or space aliens playing around with the postal services—anything but simple chance.

  The problem is, chance isn’t simple. You need to know a fair bit of mathematics to be able to work out probabilities. Scientists and bookies do it inside their cool heads but most of the rest of us are dismayed by the arithmetical effort and rely instead on intuition, which is demonstrably bad at estimating probability. Human beings are very easily impressed. What seems utterly unlikely to a human being often turns out to be extremely probable in the cosmic scheme of things. Think Sun and Moon.

  Or think Bible codes. According to some ancient accounts, the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, which is said to have been dictated by God himself, contains codes that if deciphered will reveal many other messages for mankind. It has long been a respectable pursuit for scholars belonging to remote and dusty religious orders to attempt to detect
hidden patterns therein, discounting the spaces and punctuation in the text and treating the letters as a regular matrix. Inevitably, given the number of letters the Bible contains, and the fact that written Hebrew contains no vowels, many coincidental word patterns have manifested themselves in these searches, to which significant meaning has been attributed.

  Computer science, far from making this arcane procedure seem even more eccentric, kicked the whole code detection business into a different league by increasing the speed and the variety of ways in which the letter matrix could be analyzed. Words could be identified running forward, backward, vertically, and diagonally in the text. Using a procedure called equivalent letter spacing it could also find words consisting of letters that were not adjacent, but were spread out in the text, each letter separated by the same number of nonrelevant letters. Computer searches carried out by the prominent Israeli mathematician Professor Eliyahu Rips discovered incredible examples of conceptually related words adjacent to each other in the text, such as the names and birthplaces of famous rabbis. The discovery of the name of the murdered Israeli president Yitzhak Rabin next to a reference to death and a vertical “Kennedy” running through the phrase “assassin that will assassinate” seemed to suggest a prophetic quality.

  Skeptics were slow to counter the claims of the researchers and Michael Drosnin’s book about the phenomenon, The Bible Code, sold millions. Even today it seems few things excite us more than the prospect of proof of the paranormal. It took time for other teams of statisticians to find conceptual flaws in Professor Rips’s painstakingly rigorous experiments. Meanwhile Brendan McKay, professor of computer science at the Australian National University, used Rips’s system to find prophetic correlations of death and murdered presidents in Moby-Dick. In the end the Bible codes merely demonstrated that given enough letters, coincidental word patterns will emerge, and that many of them, given a little interpretation and a great deal of excitement, will appear to have meaning.

  In 1967, sociologist Stanley Milgram predicted that there were only six degrees of separation between any two people on the planet. The idea entered dinner party folklore, but few people realized that Milgram’s attempts to prove it were unsuccessful. Recently, however, another sociologist, Duncan J. Watts, successfully proved a similar proposition. Watts assigned sixty thousand people a target person, possibly living in a different country and certainly from a different walk of life, and instructed them to attempt to pass an e-mail message to that person by forwarding it only to someone they knew, with a request to forward it on in the same way. On average it took between five and seven e-mails to hit the target.

  Watts’s experiment is an effective demonstration of the smallness of the world, but when incredible-seeming correlations happen to us outside of a scientific experiment they feel eerie and magical. There are many reasons why we might want them to be magical. The best is summed up by Richard Dawkins, a scientist famous for debunking the paranormal, who says, rather generously, given his standpoint, that we have a “natural and laudable appetite for wonder.”

  That appetite for wonder rekindled Joyce Simpson’s faith in God. Joyce, of DeKalb County, Georgia, saw a sign in May 1991 that changed her life. To everyone else it was a Pizza Hut advertisement, but Joyce, who at the time was disillusioned enough with religion to be considering quitting her church choir, saw only salvation. Shining forth from a forkful of spaghetti was the face of Jesus.

  A skeptic will say that if you look closely enough and with enough emotional motive you can see the face of God in any picture—spaghetti, chicken nuggets, deviled eggs—but there’d be no point telling Joyce Simpson that, nor the rapturous Georgians who lined up in their cars to see the billboard miracle for themselves once the news got out.

  Wonder engages the emotions. Wonder changes lives. Wonder makes you sit down and write that long postponed letter to Herbert Krantzer. “Dear Herbert. You won’t believe this. I was washing my old VW Beetle, prior to finally selling the damn thing, and I found a note from you, dated June 1986, inside one of the hubcaps, wishing me a ‘long and happy journey!’ You must have slipped it in there on my wedding day all those years ago.…” It makes you feel especially blessed when Herbert writes back to say how good it was to receive your letter, particularly at that moment, for he is in the very process of finding an old VW Beetle for his son.

  What made you take the hubcap off, for the first time in seventeen years, at that particular moment? To clean it, the skeptic will say. The letter finding event was acausal; in other words, you didn’t find it because it might be propitious to contact an old friend at that particular point in time.

  To most human beings this is a pretty bland interpretation. It’s the word “acausal” that rankles. It renders what seemed full of wonder flat and dull. The letter writer may consider himself to be a rational thinker, but his mind is more interested in indulging the possibility that a guardian angel is smiling on him, or that his relationship with Herbert is so significant that some kind of telepathy is in play. He would rather take the agnostic “who knows?” position than consign it to mere chance.

  Acausality doesn’t do justice to the experience, especially when the experience is very personal. If a man dreams one night that his friend Moriarty is dying and then wakes up to be told that Moriarty has actually died, the notion that he may be psychic is extremely hard to resist. As is the notion that God sent him a warning to soften the blow, or that there are parallel universes in different time dimensions to which he might suddenly, because of the strength of his emotional compact with his friend, have gained access, or that the emotional right-hand side of the brain, containing a primitive intuitive consciousness suppressed by centuries of evolution, has woken up during his sleep, or that an event has come about because of the motivating power of his own thought process (on second thoughts, scrub that one).… There is no shortage of such explanations and every one of them is more interesting than arbitrary, impersonal, acausal chance. What makes them utterly irresistible is the way they engage the dreamer emotionally with the fact of the death: they impart a sense of having been present, or somehow consulted, at the end.

  Statistician Christopher Scott has worked out the odds in the UK of dreaming of a friend’s death the night it happens. Basing his calculation on fifty-five million people living an average of seventy years and experiencing one friend’s death dream per lifetime, and then factoring in a national death rate of two thousand every twenty-four hours, Scott reckons there’ll be an accurate death dream in Britain about every two weeks. It’s human nature to recall only interesting stories, so accurate dreams are widely reported and frequently retold, while millions of dreams about dying friends who turn out the next day to be on the mend are routinely discarded from memory.

  “How do you know,” the dreamer might say, “that all the dreams that didn’t come true weren’t of an inferior quality to mine? My dream about Moriarty had authority. It was so vivid it had to be true. It was as though the gods were intervening in human affairs—it was a deus ex machina!”

  “Why would Zeus have confided in you?” asks the skeptic.

  “Well, you know … we’re pretty close.”

  “What about that time you dreamed you were being chased naked through Starbucks by Julia Child waving a cleaver? Has that come to pass?”

  “Not exactly … though it could, of course. Anyway, not all my dreams are prophetic.”

  “How many have been?”

  “Well, there’s the dream about Moriarty … and I once dreamed I was going on a long journey and soon after I won a weekend trip to Paris…”

  Out comes the calculator again. “So … two prophetically accurate dreams in thirty-six years … let’s say you have three dreams a night … that’s one clairvoyant vision in every 19,710 dreams, or put another way…”

  “No you’re wrong, Clever Dick, because there’s something I haven’t told you. None of this—Moriarty, the dream, your calculator, the whole of existence and every s
keptic who ever set foot in it—actually exists. The universe is actually a figment of my imagination. I made it all up! In fact I’m making you up right now. Work that out on your calculator!”

  You see how coincidence sparks the imagination! Note also that all explanations except chance grant the observer a starring role. Nowadays most of us tend to accept the skeptic’s rationale, at least outwardly, but privately we like to at least flirt with the center-stage glory coincidence gives us. It’s a natural enough desire that goes hand in glove with the need for an explanation for the universe that makes us feel less like a speck of random space dust and more like a cosmic player. Even the most skeptical probability mathematician, on finding a bottle washed up on a beach in Madagascar containing a note addressed to him, might be tempted to entertain that awesome possibility.

  Yet if this event is meaningful, what exactly does it mean? He can only pitch a guess at that. Or he can seek the advice of a New Age counselor or shaman, if he can find one who is trustworthy and reliable and not given to irrational flights of fantasy.… The realization at this point that he is stepping into a supernatural rocket ship fueled by high-octane superstition and without a qualified pilot might remind him that he is a skeptical probability mathematician. Those who abandon empirically testable evidence as a basis for important life choices in favor of the subjective interpretation of random events, follow a convoluted and perilous path, as history has demonstrated only too often.

  Two and a half thousand years ago, when Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex, nobody was backward about predicting the future. They could research their destiny as readily as we can research our history and everyone had a direct line to the gods. Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos sound like members of the Marx Brothers, but to the average man they were very real, and not a bit funny. They were the three Fates, the indifferent celestial beings that meted out the thread of life apportioned to each mortal, decided on a few choice life qualities (tragedy, illness, etc.), and efficiently snipped it off at the due date. This thread was a man’s moira (allotment). He couldn’t erase the best-before date, nor could he escape his moira’s negative elements, though he could, if he was foolish, make things much worse for himself.