FLUKEY OR SPOOKY? Incredible real-life coincidences or are they?

[wolram]

Some time ago a million to one event was thought to be improbable, the population of Earth has increased, machines work faster, so now a million to one chance is much more probable even expected, the unexpected is buried in numbers per cycle.

 

[baywax]

Some time ago a million to one event was thought to be improbable, the population of Earth has increased, machines work faster, so now a million to one chance is much more probable even expected, the unexpected is buried in numbers per cycle.

What's the cycle and what's its rate of attrition with regard to chance and improbability? I would imagine it would, to a large degree, rely on the level of efficiency re: the society producing the numbers and the conditions.

Are coincidences dependent on any sort of condition? Is there a cycle of coincidence?

I would suggest that the rate of coincidental occurances only seems to multiply with the reporting, publishing and discussion them. There may be a correlation between population numbers, technological advances and so on but these factors also add to the efficiency/proliferation of reporting, publishing and discussion of events such as "coincidences".

There are some events that are hard to explain such as thinking about someone then running into them within the same hour. This may be something other than coincidence and more of a result of cognitive interpretation of events resulting in a conclusion such as thinking of a friend. I could explain if anyone wants.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Please limit all formal explanations to well established science. Our goal is to see if events can be explained with known science; not to posit new theories. Likewise, to say it is all a matter of the odds means nothing without quantification.

 

[wolram]

Please limit all formal explanations to well established science. Our goal is to see if events can be explained with known science; not to posit new theories. Likewise, to say it is all a matter of the odds means nothing without quantification.

Maths is not scientific? what rules do you want to apply to two bodied to show they will not meet at some point?

 

[LightbulbSun]

Please limit all formal explanations to well established science. Our goal is to see if events can be explained with known science; not to posit new theories. Likewise, to say it is all a matter of the odds means nothing without quantification.

It really is just the odds. I don't see anything else to this.

 

[sas3]

I posted this on a different thread a while agao, but thought i would repeat it in this one.

Enjoy the strangeness!

I went to a concert (Moody Blues, Beach Boys, and The Fix) at Alpine Valley. During the Moody Blues I and my X were standing just behind the paid seats and she did not like the people we were around so we moved way up the hill and sat on the grass. Well I was bummed because the Beach Boys were just about to start and I could hardly see the stage. Well just then a couple came up the hill and asked if we would like there tickets, 3rd roll center. They just came to see the Moody Blues. Well we took the tickets and enjoyed the rest of the concert. 12 years later I was divorced and living back in my home town Tichigan Lake, one night I went to the local bar to have a few drinks. I went and played some Moody Blues and Beach Boys on the jukebox and sat down at the bar and the girl next to me started up a conversation about a concert she went to at Alpine Valley. It was the same girl that gave us the tickets. Tichigan Lake is a very small place and she just happens to end up at that bar on that night (she had never been there before) and just happened to start talking to the guy next to her which was me.
I often think back on this and think of all the things that had to occur for this to happen.
Very Strange!

 

[small_bang]

Yes...when you think of all the things that had to fall in place precisely in order for it all to come together...

I have another one.

I had a client that I performed an ongoing service for (photography) The owners son also worked there. This son had a woman friend who worked in a large graphic design firm. Through this connection I got several jobs from this woman. She was also involved in producing a one-off catalog for my client that I did the photography for.

In the meantime, my client was being solicted by another ad agency to use their services. Eventually they did and hence I became involved with them too. I also have since become friends with one of the partners of this agency and to this day, over15 years later, still work together.

Coincidentally, this person from the agency (I'll call Tom) also went to college with this women friend ( I'll call her Jane) of my clients son and actually knew each other back then.
(OK, its a small world...nothing weird about that)

Fast forward 3 or 4 years later. In that time I never had contact or even heard from, or about, this woman Jane.
So one day I'm sitting in the office of Tom, discussing some business. Out of the blue I do a total non sequitor and say..." Gee, I wonder what ever happened to Jane.
"Have you ever heard anything from her?"
He tells me "No...nothing." We finish up our business and I go home.

That evening I turn on the tv and start quickly surfing through the channels. As I'm flipping, my brain quickly registers recognition of a face. I stop and tune in. It turns out that the face I recognized is none other than this woman Jane! She was the topic of a segment on one of these lifestyle shows. She was now the photo editor of a fashion magazine.

When I think about the coincidence of all this...not only the bringing up her name in conversation but that if it I had just been a fraction of a second off in my channel changing...whew. weird.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Maths is not scientific? what rules do you want to apply to two bodied to show they will not meet at some point?

To make blanket statements without any calculations is not scientific. You stated that it is all in the odds. Well then, take one of the more interesting examples and prove that this makes sense by calculating the odds, and then showing how many similar events can be expected [perhaps for a sample population over a given interval of time].

Baywax was talking about something else - a personal theory to explain these sorts of things - and I wasn't sure where he or she was going, so a reminder was posted to avoid going into no man's land.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

It really is just the odds. I don't see anything else to this.

We already know your opinion, now prove that it makes sense.

 

[LightbulbSun]

We already know your opinion, now prove that it makes sense.

What exactly do you want the odds on?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I suggested the "key story" long ago... of course I know for a fact that my stories are true, and I like the one about meeting my classmate who was riding a horse in the middle of the desert. That was a real shocker! Or, perhaps other members have a favorite. But, to be fair, it would have to seem very unlikely on the face of things.

 

[LightbulbSun]

I suggested the "key story" long ago... of course I know for a fact that my stories are true, and I like the one about meeting my classmate who was riding a horse in the middle of the desert. That was a real shocker! Or, perhaps other members have a favorite. But, to be fair, it would have to seem very unlikely on the face of things.

Well just remember, even a one in a million chance these days is a very probable ratio. You're going to have to dig up some factual numbers so we can make a better judgment on this.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

One in a million events are common but only for some types of events.

What would you like to know?

 

[Integral]

How about meeting someone online, only do discover that you share alma mater, have the same degree, and most amazing the SO get along!

To weird.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

That is funny. I think there were about 1500 members when I joined. Most of these people were from the U.S., but not all. And I think we had about ten mentors when I joined the staff [including Integral]... does that sound about right? Also, for some strange reason we had four mentors from Oregon!

Integral and I met on PF and found that not only did we attend the same school where we both got physics degrees, and consequently that we know or knew many of the same people as we are fairly close in age, but we also live a short distance apart. We struck up a friendship as a result, and considering that most people annoy me, that is saying something!

 

[LightbulbSun]

One in a million events are common but only for some types of events.

What would you like to know?

The odds of running into someone you know, but haven't seen in about a few decades.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Ah, but you are the one asserting that this can all be explained by the odds. The burden of proof is yours to support this assertion with calculations. I will gladly provide details of my encounter with my classmate, but I have no idea what the odds of the event might be.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Yesterday I posted this.

From there he went to The Tomorrow Show, which I watched for many years. I remember him talking one night with a comedian and good friend - forget his name - about an evening at an expensive Los Angeles restaurant. After getting exceedingly drunk, they noticed two suits of armor in the lobby. Somehow they managed to get into the armor and started greeting guests with a sword and lance, which nearly got them arrested.

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=178756

A few hours later I ran into town [a small town some miles from here with a pop of about 10,000] and stopped at my favorite mart for milk and such. The adjacent business closed recently and a new one has moved in, but they are still preparing the building. The store only has a few parking stalls, and I was forced to park in front of their neighbors place. As I pulled up to the parking stop, I looked up and through the window saw a full suit of armor, complete with sword.

 

[moose]

On Wednesday I was with a friend leaving his GFs house. We were on our way to a grocery store. We were talking about many things and at one point we started talking about a friend of ours who joined the Air Force back in March. We go into the store, and my friend yells "Oh my god!". I look and there's the air force friend standing there! We haven't talked about this kid for months and the day we mention him happens to be the first day he comes back from Texas. The fact we even saw him was weird. He was only at the store for 10 minutes.

It's also cool when you and a buddy start singing the same song at the same moment out of nowhere. It's happened twice to me where a friend and I have started to sing the same song at the same moment at the same part of the song, without having heard the song for days. It's kinda creepy, but it's possible that there was some noise made by the AC or the fridge which happened to sound like a part of some song. I don't know.

 

[Far Star]

A number of years ago a man was walking along the road and my first thought was "Someone's going to hit him". He wasn't close enough to the travel lane for concern so it was a little weird to think that. A few minutes later I passed that way again and he'd been hit by a car.

Not quite as spooky as the nuns and dog, though. I've been wondering about that one for days.

 

[Swatje]

I once met someone from my class 600 miles from where I live.

Now THAT was wierd.

 

[mgb_phys]

Well just remember, even a one in a million chance these days is a very probable ratio.

I tried to convince an IT manager of this, we had a cluster of 64 machines, each with 16Billion bits of memory and doing 3Billion operations/second.
He couldn't see that we should get random errors occasionally - because "computers don't make mistakes"

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I had been planning that Tsu and I go for a hot-air balloon ride on Saturday for her birthday. As it turned out we decided to wait as it wasn't a good time to do this. Nonetheless, it was a real eye-opener to wake up to this on Saturday morning.
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=50ae170b-a69b-444f-80c4-15655297cb28&k=92642

 

[Burnsys]

This is what happened to me, i work as a software developer, so i have advanced knowledge of computers, i am also a performance freak, and my home computer almost never crashes.
I live with my girlfriend and i have a couple of folders she must never see! (that means if she see those folders the relationships is over!) anyway i am very carfull when opening those, i always close them, they are hidden in the hard disk and has names that don't mean nothing, So one day i forgot to close one of the folders and went to work. A couple of hours after i came back my girlfriend was in the computer and she told me: Look, what is this folder? Call me lucky, the folder just hang out Explorer.exe! (it never happened me before) and so it's contents could not be seen.. So i sayd, mmm. it looks like a virus! Restart the PC!

 

[mgb_phys]

i have advanced knowledge of computers...
my girlfriend...

Now that's a coincidence too far!
I mean, meeting the Loch Ness monster and Elvis in the same motel - ok, but "I have advanced knowledge of computers" and "I have a girlfriend" is just too far fetched.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I was reminded of this today: There was a skit on the show "Saturday Night Live", way back with the original crew, in which John Belushi and Gilda Radner [two of the original cast members] were each playing them self, but many years in the future. The set-up was that as the only surviving cast members, now old and gray, together they walked around a graveyard where the rest of the cast was buried, and they reminisced about the good ole days.

Gilda and John were the first two cast members to die.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Also, take a look at the strange similarities between Kennedy and Lincoln.
http://www.school-for-champions.com/history/lincolnjfk.htm

 

[Far Star]

Gilda and John were the first two cast members to die.

Hadn't thought of that. More spooky than fluky.

 

[bassplayer142]

I have a few stories of things like this. The first one is a number one like many of you had but I feel mine is really significant. First of all the number is 817. Many times I have seen it and showed people to where they think it is kind of funny. I remember driving by a house and seeing it on a mailbox just staring at me. When I bought my used truck I opened the hood and under it near the radiator is 8-17 stamped on there. It wasn't some number that came when the truck was made. It's like a yellows stamp kind of crooked and off centered like someone put it there obviously before I owned it. Next comes a even more unprobable part. My birthday is August 17 which is 8-17. Did I mention that My birth certificate says I was born at 8:17 (pm I think). All these can be proved if someone is interested. I will try to think of more for later

 

[phlegmy]

my weirdest co-incidence was about billy joel!

i had a dream (just before waking up) with that billy joel song
"in the middle of the night... etc"
i mentioned it to my mother over breakfast. she was going to give me a lift into town, i can't remember for what.
so halfways to town i turn on the radio and, you guessed it, that exact billy joel song started playing. and it dosn't get much airtime (not sure if I've heard it since). anyway my mother and i were very amused at this!

now the chances of that happening are remote but well within possibility but...

we arrived home after about an hour or so and the postman had been. and there was a letter for me, it was from an old school friend i hadnt seen in about 2yrs and the letter started out as a how do you do type letter, he wrote that he'd remembered that i was BIG into music and he thought that i "had what it takes" and to encourage me he included the story of another young musician, which took up more than half the letter, that musician was Billy joel! that was the only time i heard from the guy in the last 7 years!

 

[Huckleberry]

When I was in the navy I was eating lunch on the ship with a friend. He was the weatherman. We had known each other for several months, perhaps a year, but had never talked about our past. Somehow the conversation came to where we were from. He said he was from Pennsylvania. I told him I had lived there for a year when I was a child. Turns out we lived in the same small town. We had a friend in common. They had the same first name. A year or so later I met him again at my friends house while I was visiting for the holidays.

Things like that happened a lot when I was in the military, with enough frequency that they weren't that surprising anymore. The number of people that I interacted with was much greater than it is now. Now I see the same people every day and there doesn't seem to be as many surprising coincidences. When I'm outside of a familiar area or activity I notice these things more.

 

[Anticitizen]

I have two.

I'm originally from Knoxville, Tennessee.

When I was in sixth grade, my parents decided to do a road trip of the northeastern coast.

We spent two days in Washington, DC.

So I'm in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, staring blandly at Ross Perot's helicopter, and I look down, and on the other side of the helicopter is one of my schoolmates and friends, also looking at the helicopter. His parents also had decided on a Northern trip for the summer.

I saw him the next day at the Natural History Museum.

I knew from talking to him that he lived only a few blocks away from my house, but I never saw him in my own town before or after that event outside of school. Kinda wacky that the only place I'd see him outside of school would be many hundreds of miles away.

The second is freakier in my mind...

Around 18-19 years old or so, I randomly grew a taste for island music of several flavors - calypso, reggae, mambo, etc.

I was visiting a friend in a nearby city, Oak Ridge (one of the two birthplaces of the atomic bomb) which is about 15 miles away from Knoxville.

We stopped into a thrift store at random.

Well, I started sifting through the vinyl records that one inevitably finds in a thift shop. (I had a turntable at home). I found some "south seas" music records, purchased them, and took them home.

Well, I pull the first record out of its cardboard sleeve, and find that the person that owned the record was the sort of person that puts their name and address on everything. The fact that someone would put their name and address on a vinyl record of generic mambo tunes is unlikely enough, because when are you going to ever lose a freakin' record?

Well, the name was unfamiliar, but the address was MY ADDRESS.

The home where my family lived, and still lives, (in a neighboring city of 250,000+ people!) for over 25 years!

Blew my teenage mind. Against all odds, someone decades prior liked the same obscure sort of music that I liked, in the same obscure (nowadays) medium that I employed (vinyl), that decided to put their name and address on the record, and lived in the home i was pottytrained in and graduated high school in - then gave their vinyl record to a thrift store in a neighboring city where they presumably moved, where I many years later walked in and purchased it.

Don't even know how to approach the odds on that one.

 

[DHFabian]

I'll go with fluky, considering the international nature of online stuff. I was doing some research this morning on alleged paranormal activities around southern Wisconsin. I came across a 2007 post on this board from "sas3" who mentioned being from Tichigan Lake. I grew up in Tichigan (left in the mid-1970s, and moved to Jefferson Co by way of California...don't ask). The writer mentioned a concert by the Moody Blues (my favorite band since the late 1960s)and this post was written on my birthday (July 12). Coincidences happen.

 

[DaveC426913]

I'll go with fluky, considering the international nature of online stuff. I was doing some research this morning on alleged paranormal activities around southern Wisconsin. I came across a 2007 post on this board from "sas3" who mentioned being from Tichigan Lake. I grew up in Tichigan (left in the mid-1970s, and moved to Jefferson Co by way of California...don't ask). The writer mentioned a concert by the Moody Blues (my favorite band since the late 1960s)and this post was written on my birthday (July 12). Coincidences happen.

You know what spooky activity I just saw??

I just saw a thread rise from the dead, having been buried for almost three years! Whoa!

 

[GeorginaS]

Yeah, but it works so nicely with the current "Ghost Story" thread.

Oooo was that a coincidence? Or did someone make that happen?