Miracles - Displays, Beliefs, Need, and Littlewood's Law

Context: Preserved saints' bodies. Apparitions. Sudden healings. Places dedicated to miracles, pilgrimage destinations, magic wells, just touch this, and their persistence even after formal repudiation by some authority (debunking). The beliefs are as many as the form taken by the "miracle." See the Medjugorge post, Bosnia Road Ways, Medjugorge post; and the numerous cathedrals with exhibits, grottoes showing where this miracle occurred, or that, and the devotion of followers.

Sometimes: Even after Church authorities say to stop making claims about Medjugorge, that nothing has been affirmed in their processes, the Medjurgorge institution still does, just in a more roundabout way. Watch the buses. People want, the market provides. Maybe the event or vision or healing did occur, but is it a miracle. How about mind-body connections, synchronicity, confirmation bias, coincidence, even hysteria in the older term, all to be looked up.

1. Littlewood's Law. For some, go no further. The assertion is enough. Believe. For some of the rest of us, we would like to know more. At Cambridge University, a Professor J. E. Littlewood framed a law during the course of his work with huge numbers ("Law of Truly Large Numbers") that goes like this:

• a person is awake and alert say 8 hours per day
• during alert periods, a person experiences a thing a second - see this, see that, as the eye darts about
• 35 days of this kind of visual (does the law include things heard, felt, etc?) onslaught means the person experiences some 1,008,000 things while alert during a little more than a month
  
• define a "miracle" as "an exceptional event with particular significance" that occurs "one in a million" times
  
• by all that, a person can expect to experience a miracle about once a month

All this from ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27s_Law. The article sites as further reading for the interested, a book by Freeman Dyson at ://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=16991 (debunking pseudo-sciences, esp, telekinesis, and - it says further - learn the magic tricks yourself in order to be convinced, to avoid being deceived). NY Review of Books article is from 3/25/04, vol,51, no.5. "Debunked"

There is also "Miracle on Probability Street," in Scientific American by Michael Shermer, August 2004, at ://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=00094511-E068-10FA-89FB83414B7F0000&colID=13

Is this so?

Back to other topics relevant to whether an event is "miraculous" - mind-body, synchronicity, coincidence, confirmation bias. These can help where the event occurs by dream, or sudden elucidation, or other non-visually or when someone is not alert, for example?

2. This segues us to the delights of Eponymous Laws - where connections/observations get stated as laws and are coined by or attributed to people whose names then get attached to the law. Murphy's Law, for example. See the long list at ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adages_named_after_people

Duffy's Law - "Most people are wrong about most things most of the time." Bradford's Law from 1934 - the "exponentially diminishing returns" of a library search. ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adages_named_after_people#B.E2.80.93D. Persi Diaconis, another mathemetician, quoted at ://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/04/miracles.html: he supposedly said that if you study a large enough group long enough, "any damn thing can happen."

So we end this search. Look up testimonials on miracles and you will see what you will see.