Tuesday 17 April 2012

Coincidentally...

The other week I heard a feature on the radio about coincidences and it stuck in my mind. A Professor at Cambridge University is putting together a study/survey on the subject so that he can explore the scientific explanations, and it was clear from his interview responses that he thinks coincidences are just that: simultaneous chance occurrences.  I mean, he doesn’t believe that anything cosmic or fated or supernatural is going on.   So, people are sending him their remarkable coincidence anecdotes to go through, many of which are the kind that can make your spine tingle a little.  One memorable tale was from a woman who had bought an old framed painting from a junk shop whilst on holiday abroad.  Upon removing the frame later she found, stuffed into the back, a page from a decades-old British newspaper, and on that page was an article which, amazingly, included a photo of her as a child!  It just made me think: what are the odds?  Surely too slim to be just chance? - there must be some reason behind it!  She was meant to buy that picture…!  Why she was meant to, I don't know - presumably nothing significant happened because of it -  but it’s hard to engage the logical, prosaic part of my mind and just accept that there is nothing more to it than mere coincidence.

I think small coincidences happen quite often but we rarely remember them for long.  They also say if you're the kind of person who chats to strangers you'll notice them a lot - those odd moments when you strike up a conversation with someone in the seat next to you on a 'plane 1000 miles from home, for example, and it turns out that their brother-in-law lives in your street - that sort of thing. It's a small world ("but I wouldn't want to have to paint it" as comedian Steven Wright so neatly said). 

But I’m sure everyone experiences one or two that seem particularly significant and bizarre.  My most striking one was when I was about eleven, walking through a forest with my family during a day trip and talking about my latest interest in penfriends.  I was already writing to children in Australia and Kenya and I’d now decided I wanted a penpal from Jamaica - that was what we were discussing (I was a fan of exotic-sounding countries...)  As we followed the track between the trees something small and colourful caught my eye in the dry leaves underfoot.  I bent down to get a closer look and found it was a postage stamp, of all things, and not only that  –  it was a Jamaican one.  What were the chances of there being a Jamaican stamp  in the middle of that forest on the rare occasion that I was there at all, on that path, talking about the subject at the very moment I came to it?  It’s a weird one.

The man on the radio talked about probability and it seems that what most think of as extraordinary is often quite commonplace – e.g. apparently there is such a thing known as the ‘birthday problem’ in maths; that if you put a group of twenty-three people in a room, there is a 50/50 chance that two of them will share a birthday. Something in me struggles with the idea that, with 365 birthdays to choose from, two out of twenty-three in a random group would ever be the same.  

Other coincidences that were discussed resonated strongly and no doubt do so for most people – such as all those times when you find yourself thinking about somebody and they phone/turn up/text etc. at that exact moment.  I can’t help liking the notion that some form of telepathy exists and that, if transmitters can send invisible radio and TV signals, then surely - with all the electricity in our brains and the complexities within our grey matter that science still cannot fully explain – it’s not totally implausible for us to be able to transmit and receive basic thought-waves/energy?  Or perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.  Who knows?  Am I thinking about you right now? 


10 comments:

  1. Probability - tis interesting in maths - the birthday one is a good one - remember there is still only a 50% chance of two people in the room having the same birthday - frankly not that short odds if you were a betting person.

    The picture with the newspaper cutting - it was calling her in someway. I'm sure there is something we don't understand at work and that is a great example, to me it isn't divine provenance or whatever but something we don't understand around energies... when you get down to the lowest level of physics you get to ... What is an electron? It's the thing that orbits the nucleus in an atom all the kids reply. Is it? Actually it is the probablity of a charge being somewhere at anyone time - as you then look at it Quantum comes into play - this is how things flip states in Quantum, if you look at the maths as the distance and mass gets smaller the chance of it happening approaches 1 - i.e. definitely. Once you are up at even atom sizes the way the maths works the chances of the atom flipping from here to there are massively reduced but could still possibly happen... so we're all just held together by probability... Hitch Hikers Guide and all that if you've ever read it

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    1. Hi Furtheron - and many thanks for dropping by. Oh I wish I had a better understanding of physics/maths! For some reason my brain just can't grasp that stuff. I tell myself it's all logical, there are no variations, things must make sense... but still I have a mental block! It's as if words like 'electrons' and 'Quantum' were barred from it long ago and are now unlikely to ever get past the bouncers at the doors of my mind: "Nah, you can't come in 'ere mate, not unless you bring a picture". However I do like the sound of us "all just being held together by probability". It has a ring to it!

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  2. It's mind-frying stuff, to which I certainly don't have an answer. My own most notable coincidence was when I went to a small Greek island with a girlfriend years ago, partly to help us both get over a pair of recent boyfriends. Sitting at a taverna in a little square in a quiet town, I almost spat my Fanta all over the table when the same ex I'd come there to get over suddenly strolled into view.

    In true Greek tragedy fashion, he and I had a brief, "can you BELIEVE this"-fuelled reconciliation (ie, for the night), and by morning we were both fully re-aquainted with all the reasons we'd split up in the first place.

    Perhaps I needed that coincidence to finally lay the relationship to rest?

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    1. That's a great story, Kolley! How very strange, but perhaps, yeah, it was one of those weird things that happened for a reason. Godless as I may be, I still get this feeling sometimes that some things do.
      I've had that when I've bumped into people from a place of work, or from another time in the past, in places where neither of us would normally be, and just think, "what are the chances?" but then again I suppose, why not? It's that 'small world' thing again...

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  3. Just now (2:30 am) i was having such an aggravating dream that I woke myself up.

    It happens maybe once or twice a year. I checked my phone to see how much longer I had to sleep and it was dead. I have to meet people early.....well, in a couple of hours.

    Anyway, phone's plugged in and I'm goin back to bed.

    Nighty night.

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    1. Mornin'!
      That's quite odd - like a subsconscious niggling doubt that woke you up deliberately... who can say... but I bet you're glad it did!

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  4. I find coincidences and synchronicity fascinating. I'm not saying there is absolute meaning behind them all but, on the other hand, I am open to the idea that there may be meaning behind everything we do or say...OK, hedging my bets a little there. So, I suppose I am more inclined to believe that synchronous events happen for some kind of reason that we may, one day, understand.

    One relatively recent event springs to mind. I had a brief flirtation with Friends Reunited and whilst scanning the names of some folk I used to go to school with I came across a girl (OK,very much a woman now) who I had very little to do with when we were in the same class; I'd say we basically ignored one another and must have very rarely crossed one another's minds. Seeing that there was a severe shortage of people I knew well I just sent her a quick 'hello' and expected to never hear from her. It turns out that something I said (about 'time', apparently) once whilst in the same room as her had, eventually but quite directly, led her to take up an academic career for which she was just completing a thesis that, in part, looked at the whole concept of 'coincidence' and synchronicity. She told me that for that very reason, she had been thinking of me the same day I got in touch with her. Pretty odd, I think.

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    1. That's a nice tale, SB! I rather like the idea that we will never be able to fully explain coincidence or synchronicity, it just is what it is and will forever remain an intriguing mystery - or maybe not even really a mystery, just a fact - of life. It certainly helps to make it a bit more interesting, too!

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  5. You mean you found my frigging stamp ? Man....some girls will..

    Marcus Garvey

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    1. :-)
      (You're not related to that guy from Buzzcocks, are you?)

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