This is an odd question methinks, but I’ve been rolling it around in my head and on google long enough to to just ask it. Every day we hear about both miraculous odds coming true (albino hermaphrodite twins oh my!), and we also hear about rediculously high odds being used to disuade plans or theories (there’s only a 1 in a [whateverlargenumber] chance that the earth could have evolved to this point naturally) So my question is: what is the most unlikely event that has actually been observed and is thus KNOW practically not just theoretically to exist? I don’t want some lame answer about “there’s a 1 in fifty-million-google-plex chance that this particular photo would pass in front of this particular camera”, but if this kind of answer is indistinuishable from the kind of answer I’m looking for, then sorry for posting.
Somewhere on the wall a small white light flashed.
“Come,” said Slartibartfast, “you are to meet the mice. Your arrival on the planet has caused considerable excitement. It has already been hailed, so I gather, as the third most improbable event in the history of the Universe.”
“What were the first two?”
“Oh, probably just coincidences,” said Slartibartfast carelessly.
I got laid. That has to at least be in the top 5.
How about those guys that pulled a coelacanth out of the ocean? How likely is that? 
I dropped a piece of toast this morning and it landed buttered side up. That may not be as profound as xizor getting laid, but it’s gotta be in the top ten.
ok well I see now that this thread was going nowhere from the start… so… uh…
[sub]hitler nazi swastika swastika die thread die[/sub]
Well, many many years ago I was reading my dad’s “Book of Lists,” which listed (imagine that!) the top coincidences of all time. I think number one was about this guy in the late 19th century or early 20th century who was involved in a boat wreck on a certain date, and he was the only survivor. Years later on the same day, he was in another boat wreck and once again the only survivor. Not only that, but it happened a THIRD time. Sounds kind of fishy, as well as very unlikely (but I guess that’s the point), but I don’t know who reliable that book was. It’s now since been lost.
I can’t remember any of the others, but I think there was something about how this guy threw a message in a bottle into the ocean because he was in trouble or something. He was eventually rescued. Many years later he found the bottle washed up on shore containing the same message he had written many years earlier.
If you’re thinking of Frank “Luck” Towers, who claimed to have survived the shipwrecks of the Titanic and the Lusitania, and to have been the only survivor from the Empress of Ireland, then, sorry, Snopes says he made it up.
How about that story I read about a second ship called the Titanic also sinking on April 14th. Is this just a UL? If it’s true, I’d say that this goes beyond the field of probability into the downright bizarre.
Also I’ve got to wonder what the odds are on one family (the Kennedy’s) experiencing so much tragedy.
A book I got (it’s about probability theory) cites several stories of that kind:
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Mr Clinton W. Blume from New Jersey walking on the Brooklyn shore finds a hairbrush he himself had lost years earlier when the navy ship he had served on had been sunk by a German sumarine in the war
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A Frenchman named Monsieur Deschamps is given a plumpudding as a child by one Monsieur de Fontgibu. 10 years later, Dechamps is sitting in a restaurant and wants to order a plumpudding, but the last piece has already been ordered by anouther guest, M. de Fontgibu. Many years later Deschamps is invited to a friend and plumpudding is served; Dechamps says in joke the only person missing was de Fontgibu; the door opens, and a very old man enters - Fontgibu who had wanted to go somewhere else but got wrong address
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A German mother living near the French border photographs her children; she brings the film to a French store to get it developed, but then the World War breaks out and she forgets getting the pictures. Years later she buys another film, and when it’s developed it comes up that the film had already been used before, with the old picture on it, and had somehow gotten back to sale again.
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Mr George D. Bryson checks in at a Kentucky hotel. He gets his room key, and in his room he finds a letter addresses to George D. Bryson. He’s confused because nobody could know in advance what room he would get; later on he discovers the predecessor in that room was Mr. George D. Bryson from Montreal and it was him to whom the letter was addressed.
It’s of course difficult to say whether these stories are true or not, but the author of my book gives sources for all of them - which doesn’t necessarily prove their truth.
May the proof of Fermat’s last theorem ?
I was considered unfeasable for hundered of years until,
for my understanding, was proven unexpectly.
I think that the most simple answers to your question might be people getting struck by lightning more than once or the fat slobs who are the only winners of gigantic multi-state lotteries.
But i did see this on Chicago’s WGN-TV news in June. A Gary, Indiana man would throw bottles into a little creek by his house to amuse himself when he was bored. He put a little note in it asking folks to contact him and let know how far it got. The farthest response he got was Chicago’s North Shore suburbs. One day he gets a reply in the mail from a man in Ireland. Apparently one of the Indiana man’s bottles made to Lake Michigan, through the St. Lawrence Sea Way, and accross the Atlantic (most likely in the ballasts of a ship). The “what are the odds!” aspect is that the man who found it was an amercian expatriate who grew up in Indiana a few towns away from Gary and had pictures of himself as a young man playing in the creek from which the bottle originated.
Sorry I lack the actual scientific data/ 1 in a gazillion rating. It’s an interesting story all the same, but from reading the other replies, it seems pretty common.
There are any number of astounding coincidences involving lightning, for example. An individual’s chance of being hit by lightning is about 1 in 600,000. What about Roy Sullivan? He was struck seven times between 1942 and 1977. He finally committed suicide. That one’s a Guinness record. Or how about Rolla Primarda? He was killed in Italy in 1949 in his backyard. Twenty years before that, his father was killed in the same place. Thirty years before that, his grandfather was killed by lightning in the same place. Extraordinary.
Everywhere you look there are seemingly improbable events taking place. No one ever expected to see a comet impact a major planetary body in our lifetime. All of the world’s mammals were thought to be known for decades until a few previously unknown specimens were pulled out of the jungles of the Far East. Who would ever have guessed we’d find organism that thrive in thermal vents or deep within rock or bacteria that could lie dormant for a million years? What are the odds?
How about the Oh My God Particle?
I don’t know what the distribution is for particles detected by the Fly’s Eye, but I can’t imagine what the odds are of astronomers observing something that is going 0.9999999999999999999999951 times the speed of light. Light itself would only go five millimeters further in a billion years!
There’s a very famous story about a church (can’t remember which state, but I believe it was in the midwest) that I’ve read in many reliable sources, so I’m inclined to believe it’s true (I haven’t checked Snopes for this one):
Around thirty church members were scheduled for choir practice (or something) in the evening. Not one of them showed up, maybe some were sick, some had to take a trip at the last moment, whatever, but none of them were in the church, for whatever reason; there was an explosion in the church that evening, which probably would’ve killed them all.
Here’s the Snopes article on the church story, it is indeed true (though with 15 people, not 30).
Then, I nominate your post.
I was in Marine training. We were study using maps and were to be in the field all day. I got up, electricity was off, so I used my lighter (zippo) to shave by. It ran out of fluid, so as I was going out the door I grabbed lighter fluid and put it in my pack. Being married I changed at the base and then they put us on a bus. They let each of us off at different spots and we had coordinates to find. I had no trouble finding the first one and when I got there I decided to have a smoke. I couldn’t find my lighter anywhere and I was just about to go on to the next set of coordinates, when I heard someone coming. When he appeared I asked him if he had a light. He said “Well, I’ve got a lighter, but I’m out of lighter fluid”. I smiled and reached in my pack.
In high school I decided to put my name and date on dollar bills that I bought lunch with. Just to see if I got any of them back. I had been doing it for only a few days when my grandmother handed me a packet of ones she had gotten for me at the bank. I forget why she did it, just to be nice I guess. But in that packet was one of my dollars, returned just a couple days after I spent it.
I was quite shocked. Apparantly I bought my lunch, and then they desposited the dollar that night which the next day was picked up by my grandmother who gave it to me the day following.
I stopped doing it when it happened since I knew it’d never be that good again.
this is amazing. at the EXACT moment that i read the word Titanic in the above, someone said Titanic on TV (my wife said the show is VIP)
What are the odds of having an amazing coincidence occur while reading a thread about amazing coincidences??
freaky…