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

Martin Plimmer (Author), Brian King (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 27, 2005

Ever wonder what the odds are of being struck by lightning?
Or winning the lottery?
Or meeting someone from Timbuktu with the same middle name as you?

BEYOND COINCIDENCE recounts and analyzes over 200 amazing stories of synchronicity, the likes of:

Laura Buxton, age ten, releases a balloon from her back yard. It lands 140 miles away in the backyard of another Laura Buxton, also age ten.

Two sisters in Alabama decide, independently, to visit the other. En route, their identical jeeps collide and both sisters are killed.

A British cavalry officer was fighting in the last year of World War One when he was knocked off his horse by a flash of lightning. He was paralyzed from the waist down. The man moved to Vancouver, Canada where, six years later, while fishing in a river, lightning struck him again, paralyzing his right side. Two years later, he was sufficiently recovered to take walks in a local park when, in 1930, lightning sought him out again, this time permanently paralyzing him. He died soon after. Four years later, lightning destroyed his tomb.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Although this book is filled with amusing (and not so amusing) anecdotes, there's remarkably little holding it together. The authors begin by attempting to provide some context for thinking about coincidences, but the arguments are both breathlessly superficial and disjointed, ranging from omens and oracles to the role of coincidence in literature, with a cursory discussion with British mathematician and skeptic Ian Stewart on why most coincidences aren't that surprising from a statistical perspective. The authors, London-based journalists, waver between fully discounting the stories they tell and finding them utterly mysterious. The authors write, "It is not possible to guarantee the absolute authenticity of every story in this book. Coincidence stories are often exaggerated, distorted and—God help us—invented." So what are we even talking about? Couple this with the fact that some of the anecdotes are simply interesting stories—one explaining a stock market scam, for example—that have nothing to do with coincidence, and readers are left with the impression that nothing mysterious is being discussed and certainly nothing is being analyzed.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Two British journalists relay stories about bizarre coincidences. Whether a fan catches two foul balls in one game or a history buff fixates on similarities between the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations, human psychology resists consigning the facts to randomness. It's more satisfying, comforting, or aggrandizing to ascribe mysterious cosmic privilege to the one person out of millions who wins the lottery five times in succession. Most people will not do the math of probability (amusingly explained in Edward Burger and Michael Starbird's Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz, 2005). Plimmer and King accept that there's nothing more than chance at work in coincidental occurrences, but they revel in our common amazement over them. Piling anecdotes on high, the authors loosely categorize coincidences by type, such as weird facts about crimes and accidents and bumping into long-lost acquaintances on the street. Plimmer and King are fun, verbally agile guides who can entertain the credulous and skeptical alike. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; 1st edition (December 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312340362
• ISBN-13: 978-0312340360
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,611,528 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining, but...., January 23, 2006

By 

Atheen M. Wilson "Atheen" (Mpls, MN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Beyond Coincidence: Amazing Stories of Coincidence and the Mystery and Mathematics Behind Them (Hardcover)

Beyond Coincidence tends to jump from topic to topic with less focus than I would have expected from a journalist. Essentially it is a compendium of short stories that stretch the credulity of the reader and point out the difference between a miracle and a coincidence (the former being something that is not possible but happens, the latter something that has a low probability of occurring but does). Then Mr. Plimmer delves into quantum and relativity physics--and into Einstein's religious beliefs, always a signal of something "spooky" to come. In the end, one can't determine the actual theme of the book. Is one to believe that a "higher power" or some mysterious unifying "force" binds the universe and its constituents to one another in some mystic way? Or is it all just a cut and dried toss of a coin, heads you win, tails you lose?

I realize that the reader is supposed to do some of the work him or herself, to put a little thought into the material, but the nebulous character of the theme leaves one wondering what the point of the book was. If it was to instruct, there are probably better-albeit less entertaining books-out there. If it was simply intended to entertain, it was highly successful. Having read on the topic before, I had to smile at some of the stories; they certainly reveal why people are so utterly and irresistibly amazed by coincidence.

One of the best aspects of the book is that it suggests why we think as we do about coincidences: its a natural point of view that lead to human survival in a time before experiemental science was even possible. It's also natural by virtue of the fact that humans love a good, memorable story, and that sets us up to extract a skewed sample from the environment. The author's account of the pidgeons and the students responding to neutral stimuli as though they were reinforcements of whatever behavior was exhibited just before them are classic examples.

I can't decide to whom I'd recommend the title. A novice to the concepts of coincidence and miracles would probably come away with a rather confused notion of what was intended. At times the author seems to refute the science, which might lead one to believe that science has it "wrong." Especially when a writer refers to Einstein's "religion" in this context, it almost invites the wrong impression. For those who already do understand something of the math behind coincidences, the book might be too anecdotal. For those of us who just enjoy an amusing read, it's really very entertaining.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The safe place!, November 19, 2006

By 

Hiram Gomez Pardo (Valencia, Venezuela) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Beyond Coincidence (Paperback)

Coincidence is a diffused term that is part of our quotidian lexicon. And so there are many ways in order to face those curious destiny's ironies that seem to play and challenge us from time to time. As appropriately the authors state the coincidence is warm matrix that makes us to feel comfortable and relatively safe from this complex, stressing and changing world. I know of many people who refuse to leave their homes without consulting their personal horoscopes or read what the Tarot has decided for them that day; those micro destinies seem to be guided by invisible random whirlwinds that helps them to maintain an artificial balance in their lives.

But there is another level, much major and transcendental: it has to do with those incidents that hardly may find a reasonable explanation. These authors made a very respectable compendium of a set of veridical coincidences, occurred along all these years. Myth or superstitious? Random incidents or predetermined events dictated by a Supreme design? Butterfly effect or the tragedy's spirit that still nestle hidden behind the shadow of the fortuity?

If you are an avid reader about these intriguing and mysterious issues, you will have made a brilliant choice in case to acquire this book.

Recommended.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Anecdote after anecdote..., October 19, 2006

By 

Danni Akers (South Carolina) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Beyond Coincidence: Amazing Stories of Coincidence and the Mystery and Mathematics Behind Them (Hardcover)

This work starts out as a pretty interesting read, but after chapter 5, it's just anecdotes of rare events. These, although amusing at first, quickly become predictable and boring. One must also wonder about the technical competence of the authors. On page 103 William Harston is quoted as estimating the probability of an amateur golfer having a hole-in-one as 1 chance in 43,000. He also estimates that 200 million rounds of golf are played annually. From this, the author(s) extrapolate that the expectation of two golfers having hole-in-ones, back-to-back, on the same hole, as being about once per year. I'm not sure how they came to this conclusion given the data. In fact, based on the Harston data, the macroscopic expectation of this unlikely event, is more like once every 2.3 years, given, on top of the Harston data, that typically only 4 holes of any 18 round are credible hole-in-one candidates.

So, if you're looking for a book delving into the technical, probabilistic, back-ground of rare coincidences, this is not it. If you just want to pump your head full of tale after tale of rare coincidences, then you might be satisfied.