Numerology: comes the revolution - What are the Chances?

Strange things can happen by coincidence. Strange things must happen by coincidence. Fifty-sevens in the American Revolution provide an example.

Number mysticism - using nonrational insights into the nature of numbers to understand the universe better - goes back at least to the ancient Greeks. Five is the number of marriage, they said, and two is cold and wet. If knowing this enlarges your soul, so much the better for you. Numerology is applied number mysticism, and is much more recent. If a numerologist determines that your number is two, then you are cold and wet. Numerologists believe that numbers cause events. Pyramidologists see all human history in the numbers that they get from measuring the pyramid of Cheops. Users of gematria, the art and science of turning words into numbers and interpreting them, as SECOND = 19 + 5 + 3 + 15 + 14 + 4 = 60 (thus explaining why we tell time as we do), warn us away from those bearing the number of the beast, 666. Elliott Wave theorists explain the behavior of the stock market with Fibonacci numbers.

Numerologists would like us to think that they are semi-scientists, investigating nature. An argument put forth again and again by pyramidologists, Stonehengers, Bible-searchers, and others who examine their chosen objects and find numbers in them, is that what they have found cannot have occurred by chance alone. There are just too many sevens and multiples of seven, or squares, or approximations to [Pi], or whatever it is that they have found. A higher intelligence is involved, or a deity, or a secret group - someone had to put them there.

They fail to give chance sufficient credit. Amazing things can happen at random, but people are very reluctant to accept that. They insist that events must have causes, even when they don't. When children trip on rocks and hurt themselves, do they not sometimes give the rock a whop, saying "Bad rock!"? Wills, children think, are everywhere, even in inanimate objects, and wills exert themselves. Nothing happens by chance.

That is not the case. Consider the experiment (as far as I know never actually carried out) of giving each of 1,200 or so people a coin, telling them to flip it, keeping those people who flip a head and sending the rest home, and then repeating the process. After one flip, there will be roughly 600 remaining, after two around 300, and so on: the number of head-flippers will be cut approximately in half each time. After ten repetitions, there should be one flipper remaining who had tossed ten heads in a row, a remarkable exhibition of head-tossing ability. Would not he himself think that he had a rare talent? Would he not give interviews to the media, explaining his training methods and providing quotes like, "Yes, Dan, before the last toss I was tense, very tense, but I could feel the head-energy flowing through me and while the coin was in the air I was completely calm"?

Of course, head-energy had nothing to do with it. The operation of chance - blind, purposeless chance, bestowing punishments and rewards at random, with never a thought or a care for humanity - guaranteed that the lucky person would exist.

By the way, real interviews like that imaginary one occur constantly. Mutual-fund managers, explaining how their funds have beaten the market for ten years in a row, never say, "Well, I guess I was just lucky." They have methods. They have skills. They have reasons. Next year, when they do not beat the market, they will also have equally good reasons to explain why they did not repeat their success. Baseball players and other athletes frequently give similar interviews, as do people who live to the age of 100. Luck is never claimed as a factor, even when it in fact is a major factor.

Sometimes the number-hunters will give elaborate computations to demonstrate the improbability that what they have found could have occurred by chance. "What they have found" is the key phrase: It is no fair applying probability to events that have already happened. I have a dollar bill whose serial number (with letters) is F 84323030 C. The chance that I should have that bill is

[Mathematical Expression Omitted]

(1/12 because the first serial letter tells which of the twelve Federal Reserve Districts a bill comes from, and 1/25 instead of 1/26 for the final letter because I think that O is not used as a serial letter.) That is one in thirty billion, which is very small, too small, a number-hunter would say, to have happened by chance. It follows that some outside force must have seen to it that I should have that particular dollar bill.

Such logic, alas, does not follow. There is no "therefore" there. The probability that I possess that dollar bill is not .00000000003333 ..., it is 1, because I in fact have it. No outside forces are involved, besides the force of chance. Similarly, the chance that someone exists with exactly the genetic code that you have in your chromosomes is so close to zero that it makes no difference - much smaller than one in a mere thirty billion - but I do not conclude that you are so improbable that mysterious outside forces must be responsible for your existence. Your existence is no more mysterious than mine, or than that of any of our billions of fellow humans. We are here, and for no other reason than chance.