Wednesday, September 01, 2004

Moses and the burning bush? Not so special after all...

An article on the laws of probability in Scientific American suggests that "In the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month."
Physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study Dyson explains that "during the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month."
Not sure how he determined that 'the chance of a miracle is about one per million events.' Still, good news on the first of the month....

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