This is a follow-up to my last post, Decrypting The Universe. And stick with me here, this gets deep! But a fascinating read that will surely have you thinking and looking at your life much differently from this day forward.
True story!
A young waiter (Kevin) saves the life of a woman (Penny) who is choking to death. Oddly enough, 7 years early, the same woman had saved the waiter’s life when he was just a boy.
A bizarre twist of fate or can such instances be logically explained? Was it more than coincidence? Was it part of The Universe’s grand design? Do random events happen for a reason? Or can the mystery be explained by science?
Before you say Kevin and Penny were destine to collide, it was "God’s will," fate, or it was good karma coming back around, take this perspective into consideration...
Dr. Jeffrey Rosenthal, Professor of Statistics from the University of Toronto, doesn’t believe that these amazing coincidences are really that remarkable. He states that while lots of coincidence stories can be interesting and fun to retell, you have to think about the numbers. And when you do, you realize that even really surprising sounding things are just going to happen by chance every now and then. To demonstrate how mathematics can demystify seemingly improbable events, Dr. Rosenthal performs a simple experiment on randomness and probability. He randomly selects 40 people off the street and asks them to write their birthday down on a piece of paper. He believes that out of 40 people, at least 2 of them would share the exact same birthday.
You would think it would be rather rare that 2 people will share the same birthday, but actually there is an 89% chance that it will happen. And the reason is there are 780 pairs you can make out of a group of 40 people. (I’ll save you the long and nerdy formula.) And of course in Dr. Rosenthal’s experiment, the math proves true. 2 of the 40 people did share the same birthday.
What does all of this have to do with Kevin and Penny or with your life in general? Well, if you just take a specific pair of people, the chances of A saving B’s life and B saving A’s life is about 1 in 40 billion billion! It’s incredibly unlikely. But once you factor in the fact that there are so many different pairs of people out there who are trained in CPR, then there is about a 1/3 chance that at some point in your lifetime there will be some pair of people living in some local area that will save each other’s lives.
So can mathematics explain everything? Some believe in a much more mysterious theory. Dr. Gary Schwartz, Professor of Psychology from the University of Arizona, believes that random events are not random at all, but caused by synchronicity. Coincidence means something happens by chance. Synchronicity means something happens beyond chance. Synchronicity is a powerful, invisible, organizing force that orchestrates our lives - you may refer it simply as The Universe.
To understand how The Universe works, visualize iron filings. If you sprinkle them on a piece of paper, they just land haphazardly. But if you place a magnet under the piece of paper, a structure will emerge. And that structure reflects the underlying fields that are interconnecting the events. Were Kevin and Penny drawn together by an underlying force they weren’t aware of? And more importantly, if synchronicity (AKA, The Universe) is an invisible force, where is it coming from? Some type of super intelligence? That G-word?
Author and physics lecturer, Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, has a scientific explanation that has nothing to do with the existence of any God. He believes things can become quantum entangled. That means that 2 people can become linked in such a way that anything that happens to one of them is instantaneously communicated to the other, regardless of distance. That is quantum entanglement. And his theory on how The Universe works.
In short, two people that interact and then separate remain quantum entangled until they met in the future.
Whether you believe in the scientific explanations of The Universe, a super intelligence beyond our comprehension that dictates our lives, or a little of both, you have to admit it's weird. Personally, I believe that people come into our lives for a reason. And a part of them never leaves you. Take comfort in that, despite distance or the passing of time. The chances of bumping into them again are much greater than you once believed.
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