Look Out, Coincidences!

I don't know if I believe in aliens, but I do believe in coincidences.

Just after I posted this about SETI, I got an e-mail from SETI@Home (looking for a donation). For a second, I thought they had tagged me as a potential donor because of this post. Do they go out looking for people who post about SETI and ask them for money, I wondered.

I had made the all-too-common mistake of looking for causality in coincidence. But no, sometimes coincidences are nothing more than coincidental. How do I know it was mere coincidence and nothing more? Because they used my old e-mail address (phvogel still works, I guess), which they would not have found here.

It is funny how we are so drawn to coincidences, and how we try to read more into them. Here's a quote from a Psychology Today article by Jill Neimark:

In A.D. 66 a comet was seen across the sky in Jerusalem just as the Jewish people were revolting against the Romans. In 1066, another comet appeared, just before the fateful Battle of Hastings was fought over the throne of England. Were these merely strange coincidences—or are comets portents of divine intent?

In 1705 English astronomer Edmund Halley was looking through old records of comets when he noticed a coincidence: The bright comets of 1531, 1607 and 1682 had almost the same orbits and appeared approximately every 75 years. Halley concluded they were one comet and predicted it would reappear in 1758. On Christmas night of 1758, Halley's comet appeared, forever changing our understanding of comets.

Obviously we need to notice coincidences, and even hope to find something cool and interesting underlying them - like Halley's Comet. On the other hand, we also have to allow that pure coincidences happen all the time with no rhyme or reason behind them, and we need to just let them go (after blogging about them, of course).

Or, to quote Isaac Asimov, "... having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be."