While wasting time today, I found this delicious morsel on wikipedia. Professor J.E. Littlewood was a professor of mathematics at Cambridge. I believe this is what they call "applied mathematics"..."...Littlewood's Law states that individuals can expect a miracle to happen to them at the rate of about one per month."
"Littlewood's law, making certain suppositions, is explained as follows: a miracle is defined as an exceptional event of special significance occurring at a frequency of one in a million; during the hours in which a human is awake and alert, a human will experience one thing per second (for instance, seeing the computer screen, the keyboard, the mouse, the article, etc.); additionally, a human is alert for about eight hours per day; and as a result, a human will, in 35 days, have experienced, under these suppositions, 1,008,000 things. Accepting this definition of a miracle, one can be expected to observe one miraculous occurrence within the passing of every 35 consecutive days -- and therefore, according to this reasoning, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace."
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editor's note: : )
1 comment:
Putting miracles into scientific suppositions is a little bit like playing God. Whatever name you might want to give that God. And furthermore, my miracles are completely different than yours and the other way around. A miracle is something we first of all experience for ourselves. And it is for ourselves that we decide to what extent an event falls under our definition of a 'miracle'.
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