Okay, say you go to the moon, pick up a rock, bring it back, and then discover, “Holy cow! This was a piece of Earth blasted off the planet by an impact and sent through space to the moon when the two bodies were closer. How many of these things could there be? I know the moon is small, but with a surface area of almost 15 million square miles and only a few of us astronauts sent to pick up rocks, what are the chances of randomly returning with a rock from Earth? * It’s not just a ‘small world,’ as we say; it is ‘a small Solar System.’”
So, we live with coincidences. They catch our attention when they occur because they occur only rarely. Maybe we shouldn’t read too much into them. They aren’t, regardless of their shock value, indicative of something truly mysterious except for those looking for mystery. Sometimes you walk into a casino or buy a lottery ticket and win.
Finding that one Earth-moon rock was, however, something out of the ordinary. So much was involved: People, engineering, safe flight, and safe return. Fifteen million square miles of rocks to pick up, and astronauts chose one that had been ejected from Earth? Wouldn’t it seem to any conspiracy theorist that the coincidence is just too much to be believed? “Surely,” a conspiracist might argue, “NASA is revealing the nature of the rock at this time because it is trying to quash those persistent tales that the moon-landing episodes were faked. NASA probably wants funding for a trip to Mars and needs credibility.”
It’s easy for any of us to latch onto a conspiracy of some sort, particularly when a phenomenon affects us personally. And it’s just as easy to latch onto a coincidence as meaningful in a personal context. Jealousies arise that way when someone given to jealous thoughts faults a loved one of infidelity after reading into a situation some self-satisfying confirmation that supports a latent emotion. If we haven’t seen or experienced the reaction in person, we’ve seen it played out in novels and TV and movie scripts. Think, for example, of Shakespeare’s Othello. How many “Desdemonas” or their male counterparts have been unjustly accused in the history of couples torn apart by jealousies based on the supposed significance of coincidence?
Unfounded jealousies aren’t the only way that coincidences alter lives. There are conspiracists who deny the roles terrorists and individuals played in the 9/11 attacks based on their reading of coincidences. Or, remember the song about the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy, that, for example, Lincoln had a Vice President Johnson as did Kennedy, that Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and vice versa, and so on? Similarly, UFO enthusiasts spend many hours of their lives looking for evidence in coincidences to support their conspiracy hypotheses about government coverups. They ignore, however, other coincidences, such as the coincidence that with seven billion sets of eyes on the planet currently and with more than a hundred billion sets through human history, no eye has yet seen anything that irrefutably convinces the eyes that have not seen. Coincidence? I think not. Let me give a term you might consider in your daily life: The Null Coincidence.
All lives are complex. All have little time for complete awareness and thorough research. As a result, many people grab onto something little or onto the machinations of others as proof that coincidences have special meaning. The process plays itself out in social media and mass media today. It plays itself out in politics today as it played itself out in politics of the past. And it plays itself out in personal lives. Might we try to recognize that coincidences are, to borrow from Freud’s famous expression about a cigar, sometimes just coincidences, especially in a complex world? Convergences seem inevitable in a world that has so much that can converge.
The Earth-moon rock is unusual, but not totally unexpected. Because energy is conserved in our Newtonian universe, the moon moves away from Earth by about 1.5 inches per year. Extrapolate back to an early Earth to reveal that the two bodies were once very close. Some ejected piece of our planet did not have to travel far into space to fall into the gravitational drain of the moon slightly past that point of balance, or neutral point, between the gravitational effect of one body over another.
Probably no better example of a Null Coincidence exists than one found in a Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Civil War museum. There in a case lie two bullets fused in midflight during the famous battle. Thousands upon thousands of rounds fired across fields from one side to the other, and two of them, by coincidence, met at high speed and just the right angle to merge, possibly preventing the wounding or killing of two enemy combatants. Those soldiers would never have known their lives were affected coincidentally. They might not even have been firing at each other, but rather at other soldiers. Yes, those soldiers might have been killed or wounded in the fight, but not by those two bullets that met somewhere between them.
There are coincidences that we never know, some that alter our lives without our knowing. Every safe trip is a coincidence just as every unintended car accident is a coincidence of two vehicles being in the same place at the same time. What’s the coincidence of all those cars being on the road and no two of them colliding? Of course, bullets and cars that meet to cause damage, injury, or death are what we find significant.
We, of course, are the judges of significance. I saw a film made by tourists who witnessed a sleeping lioness. Suddenly, she raised her head. By “coincidence” a gazelle was leaping through her patch of savannah unaware of the lioness. As it reached the small opening at full speed, the gazelle saw the lion, and made one of its dozen-foot-high leaps, but because, by coincidence it leapt over the predator, it was doomed. Twelve feet above the ground is insufficient distance for safety when it is the twelve feet immediately above the reach of those quick, lethal claws. Had the gazelle taken a different path by just a few yards through the savannah, it would have survived.
Less injurious to man or beast are the coincidences we impose on the world. When one of my grandchildren sat in a room lined with knotty pine, she said, “Hey, that looks like a fish.” It was an elongate knot that now I cannot see without thinking that it looks like a fish. Should we call it a coincidence that the knot resembles the profile of a fish (actually, more or less)? Did trillions of branches grow on trees with only one that looked in cross section like a fish in a board? If I didn’t point out that knot out to you, would you impose the figure of a fish on it?
I can’t leave you without an anecdote. While driving through Boston, I noticed a groundhog crossing three lanes of traffic and headed for the cement divider it could never climb. Whatever motivated the groundhog to race for a barrier it could not climb or tunnel under, the critter’s fate seemed to be doomed. By coincidence, no car in the first two lanes hit the groundhog. I was in the third and managed to avoid it—no, actually, I couldn’t slow down, speed up, or swerve because of the traffic. I didn’t hit the ground hog, but a car behind me did. End of groundhog by coincidence of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Should I have read anything into the incident? Sometimes a chicken or groundhog crosses the road and makes it across; sometimes the animal doesn’t. Should we marvel at the coincidence of a nonevent as we might define the safe crossing? Can the absence of convergence be a coincidence?
*Lovett, Richard A. Sciencemag.org. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/ancient-earth-rock-found-moon Accessed on January 29, 2019.
So, we live with coincidences. They catch our attention when they occur because they occur only rarely. Maybe we shouldn’t read too much into them. They aren’t, regardless of their shock value, indicative of something truly mysterious except for those looking for mystery. Sometimes you walk into a casino or buy a lottery ticket and win.
Finding that one Earth-moon rock was, however, something out of the ordinary. So much was involved: People, engineering, safe flight, and safe return. Fifteen million square miles of rocks to pick up, and astronauts chose one that had been ejected from Earth? Wouldn’t it seem to any conspiracy theorist that the coincidence is just too much to be believed? “Surely,” a conspiracist might argue, “NASA is revealing the nature of the rock at this time because it is trying to quash those persistent tales that the moon-landing episodes were faked. NASA probably wants funding for a trip to Mars and needs credibility.”
It’s easy for any of us to latch onto a conspiracy of some sort, particularly when a phenomenon affects us personally. And it’s just as easy to latch onto a coincidence as meaningful in a personal context. Jealousies arise that way when someone given to jealous thoughts faults a loved one of infidelity after reading into a situation some self-satisfying confirmation that supports a latent emotion. If we haven’t seen or experienced the reaction in person, we’ve seen it played out in novels and TV and movie scripts. Think, for example, of Shakespeare’s Othello. How many “Desdemonas” or their male counterparts have been unjustly accused in the history of couples torn apart by jealousies based on the supposed significance of coincidence?
Unfounded jealousies aren’t the only way that coincidences alter lives. There are conspiracists who deny the roles terrorists and individuals played in the 9/11 attacks based on their reading of coincidences. Or, remember the song about the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy, that, for example, Lincoln had a Vice President Johnson as did Kennedy, that Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and vice versa, and so on? Similarly, UFO enthusiasts spend many hours of their lives looking for evidence in coincidences to support their conspiracy hypotheses about government coverups. They ignore, however, other coincidences, such as the coincidence that with seven billion sets of eyes on the planet currently and with more than a hundred billion sets through human history, no eye has yet seen anything that irrefutably convinces the eyes that have not seen. Coincidence? I think not. Let me give a term you might consider in your daily life: The Null Coincidence.
All lives are complex. All have little time for complete awareness and thorough research. As a result, many people grab onto something little or onto the machinations of others as proof that coincidences have special meaning. The process plays itself out in social media and mass media today. It plays itself out in politics today as it played itself out in politics of the past. And it plays itself out in personal lives. Might we try to recognize that coincidences are, to borrow from Freud’s famous expression about a cigar, sometimes just coincidences, especially in a complex world? Convergences seem inevitable in a world that has so much that can converge.
The Earth-moon rock is unusual, but not totally unexpected. Because energy is conserved in our Newtonian universe, the moon moves away from Earth by about 1.5 inches per year. Extrapolate back to an early Earth to reveal that the two bodies were once very close. Some ejected piece of our planet did not have to travel far into space to fall into the gravitational drain of the moon slightly past that point of balance, or neutral point, between the gravitational effect of one body over another.
Probably no better example of a Null Coincidence exists than one found in a Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Civil War museum. There in a case lie two bullets fused in midflight during the famous battle. Thousands upon thousands of rounds fired across fields from one side to the other, and two of them, by coincidence, met at high speed and just the right angle to merge, possibly preventing the wounding or killing of two enemy combatants. Those soldiers would never have known their lives were affected coincidentally. They might not even have been firing at each other, but rather at other soldiers. Yes, those soldiers might have been killed or wounded in the fight, but not by those two bullets that met somewhere between them.
There are coincidences that we never know, some that alter our lives without our knowing. Every safe trip is a coincidence just as every unintended car accident is a coincidence of two vehicles being in the same place at the same time. What’s the coincidence of all those cars being on the road and no two of them colliding? Of course, bullets and cars that meet to cause damage, injury, or death are what we find significant.
We, of course, are the judges of significance. I saw a film made by tourists who witnessed a sleeping lioness. Suddenly, she raised her head. By “coincidence” a gazelle was leaping through her patch of savannah unaware of the lioness. As it reached the small opening at full speed, the gazelle saw the lion, and made one of its dozen-foot-high leaps, but because, by coincidence it leapt over the predator, it was doomed. Twelve feet above the ground is insufficient distance for safety when it is the twelve feet immediately above the reach of those quick, lethal claws. Had the gazelle taken a different path by just a few yards through the savannah, it would have survived.
Less injurious to man or beast are the coincidences we impose on the world. When one of my grandchildren sat in a room lined with knotty pine, she said, “Hey, that looks like a fish.” It was an elongate knot that now I cannot see without thinking that it looks like a fish. Should we call it a coincidence that the knot resembles the profile of a fish (actually, more or less)? Did trillions of branches grow on trees with only one that looked in cross section like a fish in a board? If I didn’t point out that knot out to you, would you impose the figure of a fish on it?
I can’t leave you without an anecdote. While driving through Boston, I noticed a groundhog crossing three lanes of traffic and headed for the cement divider it could never climb. Whatever motivated the groundhog to race for a barrier it could not climb or tunnel under, the critter’s fate seemed to be doomed. By coincidence, no car in the first two lanes hit the groundhog. I was in the third and managed to avoid it—no, actually, I couldn’t slow down, speed up, or swerve because of the traffic. I didn’t hit the ground hog, but a car behind me did. End of groundhog by coincidence of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Should I have read anything into the incident? Sometimes a chicken or groundhog crosses the road and makes it across; sometimes the animal doesn’t. Should we marvel at the coincidence of a nonevent as we might define the safe crossing? Can the absence of convergence be a coincidence?
*Lovett, Richard A. Sciencemag.org. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/ancient-earth-rock-found-moon Accessed on January 29, 2019.
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