Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Something will happen, eventually

Episode Date: July 21, 2016

Your host opens his file of near misses and close calls. Joe Mazur examines the math and myth behind the stories we call coincidences.  Plus a grasp at the law of truly large numbers.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Something Will Happen, Eventually. Using advanced technology, I've been keeping tabs on the movements of certain individuals both known and unknown to me. Using these same methodologies that intelligence agencies use to build profiles of possible jihadis or subversives, I've been tracking their movements and associations across continents and decades, and I've happened upon a number of strange coincidence-like coincidences. For example, I have an ex-girlfriend, Marketa. From her LinkedIn page, I gleaned that on the night of July 1st, 2012,

she was camping in Yellowstone at a KOA site near the West Yellowstone entrance. Well, I was there as well, at that very campsite, on that very night. I was on a road trip, ferrying a German shepherd across the country for a guy I know in Chicago who believes air travel is tantamount to animal cruelty. In my diary on the morning of July 2nd, I recorded a dream that I had had while sleeping in my tent. Marketa was in this dream. We were shopping for window blinds

to save our carpets from the harsh afternoon sun. To think I could have emerged from my tent and encountered Marketa emerging from hers. What an astounding coincidence. Or a coincidence that almost happened. I vaguely recall the melancholy one has after having a dream like that, and the wistful feelings one gets from looking at mountains through soft morning haze. But that's it. Another close pass. There's a writer that I've long admired. He lives outside of New York in a small town on the Hudson River. I've always wanted to meet him. I feel spiritually connected to him every time I read one of his experimental plays or self-published novels.

Well, perusing his now defunct blog thanks to the internet's Wayback Machine, I've learned that he attended one of the final shows at the music venue Tonic on the Lower East Side. And he noted that there weren't that many people at this concert. But here's the thing. I was there. We probably stood near each other, passing uncomfortable glances back and forth. Another one. It was a flight I took a few years ago, from London to Kyrgyzstan.

I met a girl on this flight, and we ended up spending a few days together, dodging mobs of violent revolutionaries, singing karaoke in metal bars, and eating terrible food. I tracked down the passenger manifest for this flight. It was in one of the WikiLeaks dumps. And well, there was a woman who was sitting in the row behind me, who is now a pretty famous investigative journalist slash intelligence officer. I've been trying to get her to talk to me for this series I'm working on about surveillance. I follow her on Twitter.

She doesn't follow me. All of these near coincidences have shaken me to the core. Is a non-coincidence a coincidence? Well, yes, because if the non-coincidence had no cause, then its opposite also couldn't have a cause. Because if you had a cause for something, then you already know the cause for its opposite. So a non-coincidence has to be as equal a coincidence as a coincidence. That's Joe Mazur.

He's the author of a new book called Fluke. Joe uses math, statistics, and probability theory to help us understand the true nature of these stories we call coincidences. Like this one about Anne Parrish, a woman who, while vacationing in Paris in the 1920s, left her husband at the café after lunch to browse the bookstalls on the banks of the Seine where she came across a special book.

Jack Frost and Other Stories, which was a book that she loved as a child. So she buys the book and excitedly goes back to her husband, who's still at Dumago eating his lunch, and she shows him the book. And she said, oh, gee, you know, look, Charles, this is my favorite book when I was a child. It's just such a wonderful book. And he takes the book, flips open the cover, and he sees something that she didn't see originally, a child's handwriting. And the child's handwriting happens to be the address of Anne Parrish when she was a child living in Colorado. We don't have to do much research, Joe says, to learn that the odds of Anne

Parrish happening upon a book she owned as a child in America at a bookstall in Paris are actually quite high. Because one, Anne's husband was a very rich man. When rich people traveled in the 1920s, Paris was the tourist spot. And two, Anne's mother, who was an artist, had a very good friend, a painter, who moved to France. Now, it's possible Anne's mother gave this book to this other painter. The other painter travels to Paris and stays in Paris, lives in Paris until she dies, and her estate gets sold off. And I'm sure her library had all sorts of things. So there's a connection.

And three, Anne herself was a children's book author. I know that when I look through books in a bookstore, rummage, you rummage through writings of your own genre. So you're starting to get a bunch of connections and you put these together and you can take some kind of guesses as to what the odds would be.

That's the idea. For Joe Mazur, even winning the lottery four times, as Joan Ginther recently did, isn't really that much of a coincidence or even improbable. We think that winning four times the lottery big time is so improbable. We know in retrospect that Joan Ginther actually won the lottery four times. We are surprised by that. But we shouldn't be surprised because we only know her name and her in retrospect.

That is, after it's already happened. So what we're doing when we're thinking about Joan Ginther, we're thinking, well, is there somebody in, let's say, the world or the United States or, you know, this continent who has won the lottery four times? Is that something that is unusual? Probably not. I suspect there are many people who have won the lottery four times simply because there are thousands of lotteries. In a way, Fluke is a self-help book.

Well, the kind of self-help book a math professor would write. The world is so big. It's so inconceivably big. And the scariness gives us some impression of, you know, how alone we are in the world. And so the reason why we love these coincidence stories is that it makes us feel much more connected. That gives us a kind of a comfort in the bigger world, in the huge world, in the scary world. But math cannot kill all the magic in coincidence stories. Quite the opposite.

A little bit of probability theory goes a long way. Grasp hold of the law of truly large numbers and you will catch a glimpse of something truly magical. What the law says, this is the law of truly large numbers, it says this, if the probability of something happening is not zero, then it will happen sometime. Eventually, it will happen. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Something Will Happen, Eventually. Additional support for this episode comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science, technology, and economic performance. More information on Sloan at sloan.org.

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