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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