This is my Dojo – Miracles Happen Every Day
What is Mere Conjecture? Well, it is a blog by me, Jack Rivers Auty, and other wiser people like Tristan Wadsworth. I’m a scientist by trade and by night….. I am also a scientist. I’m writing blogs for a very particular reason. I’m married and my wife isn’t a scientist and there are only so many weird science-related thoughts a normal human being can listen to. I try to limit myself to one science rant a day — any more than that and I can see my wife’s eyes slowly glaze over (she’s only mortal).
The problem is that my mind is producing far more than one rant’s worth of eccentric scientific tirade a day, and if I don’t inflict these thoughts on my wife my mind just keeps racing through them to the point where I can’t sleep. Because of this, I’ve gotten into the habit of getting up at 4am and writing my ideas down. So, the Mere Conjecture blog is merely me excreting scientific contemplations onto those who are interested. Tristan with his Indiana Jones-esque background has a completely different view of the world and will bring a non-cold-utilitarian-science balance to the force. We’ll all aim to be funny, entertaining with a sprinkling of interesting research in there.
What I want to write about first is not really scientific but it happened this morning so it seemed like a good place to start. This morning I walked into the bathroom after having a shower and there was a particular atmosphere in the room — the lights, the heat, the moisture — just the vibe of the place which stimulated a peculiar set of neurons in my brain and I said a sentence that I’m pretty sure I’ve never said in my life. I have no idea why but I said “this is my dojo”. Now, if a betting agency like Bet365 was following my life and putting odds on various things I might do, the odds might look something like this: Singing in the shower that morning $1.50 to $1, saying a scientific fact to someone uninterested in it $1.25 to $1, eating 3 bowls of cereal on this day $1.01 to $1. Now what odds would they give the public on me saying the line “this is my dojo” – at that moment – while no one was in the house.
Well, the average person says 16,000 words per day (1), a not-well-researched Google search tells me on average there are 14 words in a sentence, so we are talking about 1,143 sentences a day. I’ve had a good 28 years of non-stop talking which equates to 11,681,460 total sentences. Up until today I had never said the line “this is my dojo” so a good guess at what Bet365 would give you, the humble Jack betting enthusiast, is about $11 million to $1 odds. Now with odds like that you might say that me saying “this is my dojo” was a miracle, the only problem is those odds only seem amazing in the context of a someone predicting that it would happen. Crazy unlikely events happen every day they’re just not that amazing because no one predicted they would happen.
As an example of what I’m talking about, I want you to think about that old pack of cards sitting at the bottom of your board game box. The chances that that pack is in the exact order which it is, is extremely unlikely and can be calculated. There are 52 cards in a pack so the chances that the first card being exactly the card that it is, is 1 in 52. That is pretty tough odds right off the bat. Then lets add the next card, the chances that the next card is exactly what it is, is 1 in 51. Now we multiply these odds together and we get 1 in 2,652. Add the next card and we get 1 in 132,600. If we multiply the odds of the whole pack being in the exact order that it is about a 1 in 80.6 million million million million million million million million million million. That pack of cards in the bottom of your board games box is a gosh darn miracle. In fact, it is such a miracle that it is all but guaranteed that no pack of cards in human history has ever been in that exact order. That pack of cards is unique; there is nothing identical to it anywhere in the world. The problem is no one predicted its order and so you might say it isn’t a miracle because it had to be in some order. This is completely true and this truth can be extrapolated to our existence in the universe after all what are the chances that a planet is just the right distance away of its star, contains liquid water, a magnetosphere, an ozone layer, an atmosphere etc. etc. It seems so unlikely that our existence feels like a miracle. But just as that extremely unlikely pack of cards in the bottom of your draw – it isn’t that amazing because no one predicted it. No one predicted that on the third planet in the Solar System, in the Orion Spiral Arm, in the Milky Way Galaxy, in the Local Group, within the Virgo Supercluster, of our Universe there would be weird hairless ape-like creatures who contemplated the chances of their own existence. And just as the pack of cards had to be in some order, there also had to be a planet with sentient life on it in order for the question of their existence to come up.
From here you can take two points of view, one is that obviously there hasn’t been divine intervention in your board games box (or on earth) and so that pack of cards (or human existence) isn’t a miracle, or you can redefine what miracle means and say you know what, that pack of cards is so unlikely that it is a miracle. I prefer the latter, partly because this is sort of a cultural appropriation of the word miracle and in a sense removes its supernatural meaning, but mostly because when you start to see the world as an amazing series of extremely unlikely events that no one predicted, the world becomes a fascinatingly awesome place- the Highlanders winning the 2015 Super Rugby tournament was a miracle, the baseball pitch that hit that pigeon was a (sad but hilarious) miracle, and “this is my dojo” was a miracle. I prefer to live in this world… Well to an extent… I won’t be going through packs of shuffled cards gasping at each card that comes next and yelling “what are the chances of that!”.
1: Mehl et al. (2007). Science: Vol. 317 no. 5834 p. 82 DOI: 10.1126/science.1139940
http://tinyurl.com/ScienceMehlEtAl2007
