COINCIDENCE AND COSMOS

[The following is from a letter sent to a friend, who had reported a troubling coincidence, some years ago.]

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COINCIDENCE AND COSMOS

I don’t see those two coincidences – yours or mine – as particularly startling.  But neither my being unimpressed, nor your being impressed, should weigh particularly heavily in the epistemological balance-pan.  For mankind is notoriously incapable of estimating probabilities in most instances.

One of the side benefits of faith is supposed to be  that it preserves us from superstitions that might otherwise get sucked in to the vacuum where faith should be. (Chesterton was fond of emphasizing, and dramatizing, this point.)  Actually I was never superstitiously inclined, even before baptism; but now there is a warrant to just wave these things off – things superficially much more suggestive.   For, I don’t believe that God communicates via such hole-in-corner monkey-tricks.

Such incidents, when they crop up, are undeniably intriguing.  The appeal seems to be  that they hint at a pattern on the other side of the carpet, which we see only wrong-side-on.  But then, as theists, we already know that; we don’t need the occasional odd chiming of chance, to tell us so.  What is worthy only of Las Vegas, should stay in Vegas.

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One of the things  I’ve been doing with my new-found, fiber-furnished bandwidth, is watching free online episodes of a TV series, “Lost”.   The whole thing is predicated on Baader-Meinhof phenomena.   

The problem with that  as the basis for a multi-year series, is that it is all too easy to conjure up.  Just as magic tricks are yawners if performed on television, which can always resort to special effects, so spooky coincidences are startling only if they happen to you.   It’s a very lazy genre.   For comedy to work, it has to be funny; and even a decent car-chase is not easy to stage.  But any footling apprentice can have a stranger say (after you meet him in an empty stadium in Australia, and then part company), “See you in another life”; and then a few minutes later, a world away on a mysterious island, in a bunker far below the earth, you run into the same guy, now wild-eyed and bearded, and stammer, “Y-y-y-you….!”   Still, “Lost” not a boring show.  The whole art consists in having an artfully selected Bridge-over-San-Luis-Rey set of castaways  -- the pert freckled girl, the doughty doctor whose stubble is never shorter nor longer than a four-day growth, the Black guy, the Fat guy, the this-and-that guy – and send them through a minuet of interactions, spiced by tingly synchronicities,  so that the coincidences become tonal, as in music.

Featuring prominently among the guiding coincidences of the show is a short sequence of small integers, arranged in order.  Fat Guy overhears a mental patient (whom the numbers have driven mad) muttering them over and over, and with them, wins the lottery!  Woo-ooo!  But then very bad things start happening to everyone he goes near!! Woo-oo-ooo!  And then they turn up engraved at the entrance to that bunker!  Woo-oo-ooo-oo-oooo!  The sequence, unremarkable upon inspection…

Actually, I must confess at this point, that I am loath to write the sequence down, though it is only the whim of a TV show.  It is not superstition exactly; more like, “Get thee behind me…”  For, although God does not communicate by such monkey-tricks, the Devil might…  Anyhow, it contains an old favorite “23”.   An otherwise highly intelligent friend of mine  was mesmerized by this number, whose spectral footprint seemed to be everywhere.  It turns out he is not alone in his obsession; an entire movie was made (unfortunately, not a good one), about the eerie qualities of this integer.

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There is one place where startling coincidences really are intriguing; and it is as far from Old Pagan or New Age spookery as possible.  I mean:  math and science.  For, the same underlying structures keep popping up in a variety of guises; the wild kaleidoscope of the world  appears, upon analysis, to be dreamed up out of a few symmetries  and a few bits of colored glass.

Here too it is possible to go astray, seeing significance where there is none.The great Eddington was much taken with the fact, that the Fine Structure Constant of physics (a dimensionless number, of course, otherwise its numerical value would be arbitrary) is very very close to 1/137 (or whatever the figure was).  Odd he should have noticed, this, actually; did he carry around reciprocals of all the integers in his head?  Anyhow, he hypothesized that the FSC was exactly 1/137; and busied himself attempting to explain the discrepancy as measured.  Well, it turned out to be mere gematria.  The FSC is not the reciprocal of an integer, and there’s an end to it.

The smaller the integer, the more it is likely to play a role in disparate structures essentially by happenstance.  Two is the king of them all – duality, binarism – and thus is indeed a very significant number, but rather in the way that water is a significant compound – you don’t get goosebumps when you discover another example.   Much more troubling are huge numbers, such as the ratio of the strength of the Coulomb force to that of gravity – how do you construct a cosmos out of such ill-matched yoke-mates?   Or, to take a recent example from mathematics, consider such apparently unrelated fields as the study of j-functions, and that of finite simple groups.  The first nontrivial factor in one of the series of the former is 196,884; the smallest number of dimensions in which the largest of the latter can operate, is 196,883.   A connection, or close but no cigar? 

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Foot-note (tail-note, butt-note) anent the Dark Prince.

Two of my favorite Christian authors, G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis,  offer antithetical depictions of the Devil.  Chesterton’s is more romantic and medieval:

Roses are redder  when you believe in the Devil.

Lewis’s, by contrast, in the Silent Planet trilogy, Screwtape and The Great Divorce, depicts what we might call the Trivial Devil (though no less dangerous for all that).  There is no romance to him; there is, we may say, Nothing to Recommend Him.  He is no Satanic Majesty, but more like a Satanic Misery,  a Satanic Minionism -- a Mere Mechanism.  And as a mechanism, he is given to chitter-chattery repe(titi)tition.

An example of what we could term a “diabolical” coincidence, in this Lewisian sense,  occurs in “The Matrix”, when a black cat (Satan in miniature, as it might be) passes, right to left, outside the doorway, and then, right after that, or sort of seguing into it, a -- a black cat passes, right to left, outside the doorway.   Neo remarks on the coincidence, merely curious, but his more seasoned team-mates are instantly more knowing and alarmed, for they recognize a revealing glitch in the diabolical master-program and runs the Matrix.   The faults and behaviors of the dark lords who run the place, are eminently mechanical, since they are, in fact, machines.