Littlewood's law
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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, inter alia, 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 is explained as follows. A miracle is defined as an exceptional event of special significance occurring at a frequency of one in a million. Suppose that during the hours in which a human is awake and alert, that human will experience one thing per second (for instance, seeing the computer screen; the keyboard; the mouse, the article, etc.). Suppose the human is alert for only eight hours per day: in 35 days, the human will have experienced 1,008,000 things. Accepting the definition of a miracle, one can be expected to occur each 35 days.
Thus, according to this reasoning, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.
References
- Littlewood's Miscellany, edited by B. Bollobas, Cambridge University Press; 1986. ISBN 052133702X
- Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, Other Pseudoscience, Georges Charpak and Henri Broch, translated from the French by Bart K. Holland, Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801878675
See also
External link
- Littlewood's Law (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16991) described in an review of Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, Other Pseudoscience by Freeman J. Dyson, in the New York Review of Books.he:חוק ליטלווד