Littlewood's law

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

• coincidence
• contingency
• confirmation bias
• Adages named after people
• Synchronicity

External link

• Littlewood's Law described in an review of Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, Other Pseudoscience by Freeman J. Dyson, in the New York Review of Books.