Expect a Miracle

In this month's Scientific American, the Skeptic column looks at miracles and the Law of Large numbers. I do believe in what Michael Shermer, the publisher, would call paranormal events, but I also believe in math. Shermer recounts the story of Freeman Dyson writing about "Littlewood's Law of Miracles, "In the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month."

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Dyson explains that "during the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month."

I love the notion that there are about a million waking seconds in a month; no wonder I can't remember what I did two Thursday's ago. I've had 500,000 experiences since then, and quite possibly lived through one miracle.