Exemplification Paper- Revised

That is a Crazy Coincidence!

         Agatha Christie once said, “A coincidence is always worth noticing.  You can always discard it later if it proves to be only a coincidence.”  Life is full of large and sometimes unnoticeable coincidences that can have different meanings to different people.  Coincidences occur with numbers, people, events, and even in nature.

            We truly live in a small world after all.  Everything is connected in some way or another.  Frigyes Karinthy came up with an idea called the “Six Degrees of Separation.”  This concept stated that everyone in the world is separated from everyone else by six links, so that a chain of “a friend of a friend” statement can be made to connect any two people in six steps.  This idea of everyone being connected in some way is also represented in an ancient Chinese myth.  It says that the gods have tied a red thread around every one of our ankles and attached it to all the people whose lives we are destined to touch.  This thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break.

            Two well-known people who were coincidentally connected in their lifetime are Abraham Lincoln and John. F. Kennedy.  These two men had seven letters in their last name, studied law, were born second children, served in the military, were boat captains, were elected President in ’60, were elected to the House of Representatives in ’46, and had four children, two of whom died before becoming a teen.  When they were killed, they were both shot in the head on a Friday, they were seated beside their wives when shot, and Lincoln sat in Box 7 at Ford’s Theater and Kennedy rode in Car 7 in the Dallas motorcade.  Both assassins used three names: John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harry Oswald.  Booth shot Lincoln at a theater and was cornered in a warehouse, and Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and was cornered in a theater.  What’s the likelihood of that happening?

            Another crazy coincidence is between Morgan Robertson’s book, The Wreck of the Titan, and the story of the Titanic.  The Wreck of the Titan was published in 1898, 14 years before the Titanic was even finished being built.  The Titan was described as "the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men," "equal to that of a first class hotel," and, of course, "unsinkable.”  Both ships were British-owned steel vessels, around 800 feet long, and sank after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic, in April, "around midnight."  Another almost exact fact from the book was that the Titan crashed into an iceberg “400 miles from Newfoundland” at 25 knots.  Most of this is true, except the Titanic was at 22.5 knots.  Lastly, both the Titan and the Titanic had too few lifeboats on board to accommodate all of the passengers. 

            People seem to find many coincidences with numbers as well.  Some people come across the same number many times throughout their life, or have a “lucky number” that seems to show up at a specific time or when they hope for it.  With Uri Geller, that number was always eleven.  He thinks that eleven “represents a positive connection and a gateway to the mysteries of the universe and beyond.”  An event in history where this number coincidentally came up often was during the attacks on 9/11.  9 + 1 + 1 = 11, Afghanistan is eleven letters long, September 11^th is the 254^th day of the year: 2 + 5 + 4 = 11, after September 11^th there are 111 days left to the end of the year, and the first plane to hit the towers was Flight 11.

            Coincidences can also be found in nature.  From certain shapes, such as a spiral, to a certain property of nature that allows us to survive, these concurrences are surrounding us all.  A famous cosmologist, Sir Fred Hoyle, realized that the particular level of an energy transition in the carbon atom facilitated the creation of carbon in massive stars.  If this energy level were slightly different, by less than a percent, carbon could not be created in the standard cycle in massive stars.  Carbon could not exist, and so biology could not exist as we understand it.  Is this a coincidence?

            With a large enough sample size, many odd coincidences are likely to happen.  Some people find it astonishing that there are more than 16 million others on the planet who share their birthday.  Everyday, events are happening in people's lives that cause them to question their true meaning.  Was that dream just a coincidence?  Does that number have a deeper meaning?  Does life have a certain purpose, or is it all just a crazy coincidence?