Beyond Coincidence: Amazing Stories of Coincidence and the Mystery and Mathematics Behind Them - Hardcover

Plimmer, Martin; King, Brian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312340362 ISBN 13: 9780312340360

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 2005

Synopsis

From magic and religion to subatomic particles and probability, a look at the baffling complexities of coincidence recounts more than two hundred bizarre stories of synchronicity that will make the reader wonder if the universe is something we can ever truly understand. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

"Addictive" -- The List

"Already resulted in many an overlong stay in the toilet" -- David Baddiel

"Entertaining and intelligent" -- Mail on Sunday

"Fascinating" -- The People

From the Author:

The coincidence project began as a series for Radio 4 and snowballed. The reason was that as soon as we started examining coincidences we became inundated with them. It wasn't just coincidence stories, though we soon had plenty of those; it was coincidences themselves, whose extraordinary correlations began crashing together about our own heads. Books opened at pages describing coincidence stories, people we rang were in the middle of conversations about coincidence, key words of things we discussed in the car would appear on passing billboards...

Coincidences cluster around preoccupations and no doubt we were obsessed, but when one day, while stopping people in the street to ask their birth dates as part of a probability experiment, we bumped into a man who had dedicated his whole life to synchronicity, it began to feel as though we could make them happen at will. Instead of writing books we should be buying lottery tickets!

Remembering that you're 20 times more likely to be hit by lightning than to win the lottery, we got on with the book. It's a small world, but as comedian Arnold Brown says, "I wouldn't want to paint it."

Long odds make coincidences all the more intriguing. It's the way events and objects hone in dramatically and sometimes mischievously on the very thing you are thinking about that beguiles first of all, yet as we were soon to discover, this is also a subject with enormous cultural, scientific and mathematical fascination. Not to mention coincidence jokes...

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0312340362
• ISBN 13: 9780312340360
• Binding: Hardcover