Littlewood’s Law An individual can expect to experience “miracles” at the rate of about one per month

Littlewood’s Law, or adage, states that an individual can expect to experience “miracles” at the rate of about one per month.

The law was framed by Cambridge University Professor John Edensor Littlewood. Wikipedia describes the law like this:

Littlewood defines a miracle as an exceptional event of special significance occurring at a frequency of one in a million. He assumes that during the hours in which 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 per day.

As a result, a human will in 35 days have experienced under these suppositions about one million events. Accepting this definition of a miracle, one can expect to observe one miraculous event for every 35 days’ time, on average – and therefore, according to this reasoning, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.

Credit: Wikipedia: Littlewood’s law

Littlewood was joking, but he makes a good point. What we often consider to be miracles or paranormal phenomena are commonplace and are simply coincidences.

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