Highly Unlikely
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
The chains of events that shaped my life were highly unlikely — one coincidence happening after another. If the chain had not unfolded just the way it did, everything would have turned out differently.
If you ever fell in love, think about the events leading up to that moment. After the fact, the events feel inevitable. It’s difficult to imagine how your life could have gone if they had not occurred when and how they did. All the pieces fell into place miraculously.
The more you know about an event, the more unique it seems. To you, the events of your own life seem like the result of an extraordinary series of coincidences. But an outside observer, with far less information, would view those same events separately instead of as a sequence. Separately, they would appear ordinary and expected and not coincidental.
Every time you toss a coin, the probability of heads is 50%, regardless of the results of previous tosses. But a long chain of events, such as heads, heads, tails, heads, tails, tails, tails, defies analysis. Only when you isolate a variable and simplify the context with a generalized perspective do the laws of probability apply.
According to Bernoulli’s Law, one of the basic principles of probability, it’s possible to accurately predict the average outcome of many similar events, but it’s impossible to predict, with certainty, the outcome of any single event. In other words, the more you know about a specific event and the chain of circumstances that led to it, the more unique that event appears. Hence, every moment of your life is miraculous.
