Littlewood's law

Littlewood's law states that a person can expect to experience events with odds of one in a million (referred to as a "miracle") at the rate of about one per month. It was framed by British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood.

History[edit]

The law was framed by Cambridge University Professor John Edensor Littlewood and published in a 1986 collection of his work, A Mathematician's Miscellany. It seeks, among other things, to debunk one element of supposed supernatural phenomenology and is related to the more general law of truly large numbers, which states that with a sample size large enough, any outrageous (in terms of probability model of single sample) thing is likely to happen.

Description[edit]

Littlewood defines a miracle as an exceptional event of special significance occurring at one in-a-million frequency. He assumes that during the hours a human is awake and alert, a human will see or hear one "event" per second, which may be either exceptional or unexceptional. Additionally, Littlewood supposes that a human is alert for about eight hours daily.

As a result, in 35 days, a human will have experienced about one million events under these suppositions. Therefore, accepting this definition of a miracle, one can expect to observe one miraculous event every 35 days, on average – therefore, according to this reasoning, seemingly miraculous events are commonplace.

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References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Littlewood's Law described in a review of Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, Other Pseudoscience by Freeman Dyson, in The New York Review of Books (subscription required)