HHGTTG Infinite Improbability Drive

This thread is dedicated to the Infinite Improbability Drive (IID) a faster-than-light drive invented by Douglas Adams, the author of the popular radio, book, television series, and later movie named The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

In the book the protagonists, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are rescued from certain death after being ejected in outer space. They are plucked from space by a ship using the IID in at the improbable odds against being rescued being 2^2079460347 to one. The power of two later turns out to be the telephone number of the Islington flat where Arthur went to a fancy dress party and first met Trillian, a girl he tried to pick up.

Douglas Adams admitted that he had to invent the IID as a plot device to work his way out of ridiculous plot situations.

But the improbable has always worked on peoples imagination. It is a regular device in fiction, like the man who was struck by lightning 7 times in the Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I am interested in stories, real, fictional or religious, about the improbable. They can be literate or just legends. They can be stories about people mistakenly perceiving some event as improbable. The stories have to have had some kind of cultural impact. A number have been told in different threads. Please try to keep hijacking to a minimum.

Quote: pacomartin

I am interested in stories ... or religious ... about the improbable.

You just opened a big can of worms.

Quote: pacomartin

They can be stories about people mistakenly perceiving some event as improbable.

What about the reverse? Improbably stories people mistakenly perceive as the truth?


I think you can guess where I'm heading....
Just open a bible. Plenty of stories that fit the criteria right there.

I vaguely recall a docummented case of a woman who got struck by a meteor while sleeping in her living room. That has to be highly improbable.

Quote: DJTeddyBear

You just opened a big can of worms.

Well, I was not looking for a long list of bible stories that people find improbable.

But many religious people feel that the theory of evolution contradicts the second law of thermodyanmics. Entropy is understood to be the measure of "disorder" of a system. All functions except "living systems" increase entropy. The statistical definition of entropy was developed by Ludwig Boltzmann in the 1870s by analyzing the statistical behavior of the microscopic components of a system.

Creationists feel the evolution is the reverse of entropy as it more sophisticated organisms are born from less sophisticated ones. Hence they feel that the 2nd law of thermodynamics precludes evolution, except by divine intervention.

Creationists do not understand evolution, nor the laws of thermodynamics.

Stories about improbability... I dunno, lots of Vonnegut's stuff deals with that in an up front manner. The World According to Garp is based on things being improbable. Gravity's Rainbow. 100 Years of Solitude. All of those explicitly use improbability as either a theme or a plot device.

Quote: Nareed

I vaguely recall a docummented case of a woman who got struck by a meteor while sleeping in her living room. That has to be highly improbable.

How ridiculous that she wasn't sleeping inher bedroom! What are the odds!

I don't remember 100 Years of Solitude using improbability as a plot device. I remember that history is very repetitive.

Quote: Mosca

Stories about improbability...

Oh, just about all stories deal with improbabilities in one way or another. Otherwise they'd be as boring as the average person's daily life.

Quote: pacomartin

But many religious people feel that the theory of evolution contradicts the second law of thermodyanmics. Entropy is understood to be the measure of "disorder" of a system. All functions except "living systems" increase entropy. The statistical definition of entropy was developed by Ludwig Boltzmann in the 1870s by analyzing the statistical behavior of the microscopic components of a system.

Creationists feel the evolution is the reverse of entropy as it more sophisticated organisms are born from less sophisticated ones. Hence they feel that the 2nd law of thermodynamics precludes evolution, except by divine intervention.

That notion reflects an ignorance of the meaning of the 2nd law. Entropy always increases globally, but it does not follow that entropy is monotonically increasing everywhere. Wikipedia gives a useful example of an air conditioner reducing the heat-energy in a room by X but increasing the heat-energy outside the room by X+Y. Y is the entropy increase in the universe, but entropy decreased in the room by X. There's no violation of the 2nd law in that situation because the room is not a closed system.

All functions *including living systems* increase entropy, because regardless of the work spent imposing order on the world, there is never work done at 100% efficiency. The extent to which work is performed inefficiently is the extent to which entropy increases (overall).

And now for the obligatory story of the improbable, one that I've related in the past.

In The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville, Warren Buffett tells the story of a fictional national coin-flipping contest to address the chances of correctly calling 20 flips in a row:

I would like you to imagine a national coin-flipping contest. Let's assume we get 225 million Americans up tomorrow morning and we ask them all to wager a dollar. They go out in the morning at sunrise, and they all call the flip of a coin. If they call correctly, they win a dollar from those who called wrong. Each day the losers drop out, and on the subsequent day the stakes build as all previous winnings are put on the line. After ten flips on ten mornings, there will be approximately 220,000 people in the United States who have correctly called ten flips in a row. They each will have won a little over $1,000.

Now this group will probably start getting a little puffed up about this, human nature being what it is. They may try to be modest, but at cocktail parties they will occasionally admit to attractive members of the opposite sex what their technique is, and what marvelous insights they bring to the field of flipping.

Assuming that the winners are getting the appropriate rewards from the losers, in another ten days we will have 215 people who have successfully called their coin flips 20 times in a row and who, by this exercise, each have turned one dollar into a little over $1 million. $225 million would have been lost, $225 million would have been won.

By then, this group will really lose their heads. They will probably write books on "How I turned a Dollar into a Million in Twenty Days Working Thirty Seconds a Morning." Worse yet, they'll probably start jetting around the country attending seminars on efficient coin-flipping and tackling skeptical professors with, " If it can't be done, why are there 215 of us?"

Improbable story? Geez, I wish I knew how to find a newspaper clipping from back about 1964 or 65. It was a column in the Charlotte (NC) Observer. The columnist reported on an incident that began with a pep rally for a high school basketball game. (Yes, at least back then, schools held some pep rallies during the school day.)

The school where the rally was held was definitely the underdog in the upcoming game. At the rally, the coach spoke to the student body and tried to express encouraging words to the effect that if the team played well, they should have a chance to win. One cheerleader spoke up and declared that she knew for certain that they would win. The previous night, she had had a dream about the game. She said of her dream, "In the final few seconds of the game, we are down by one point. (Player A) gets a rebound, passes to (Player B) who passes down court to (Player C) who scores the winning basket just before the buzzer." Of course, she named the individual players.

And that's exactly how the game ended.

According to the columnist, there was an entire student body of witnesses to the event/prediction at the pep rally and a gym full of witnesses to how the game ended. He said that a university faculty researcher (at Duke, I think) was studying ESP and related phenomena and was planning to discuss the incident with the cheerleader.

Is that improbable enough for you? I remember reading the article but didn't bother to keep a clipping. If the Charlotte Observer of the 1960s were available on line like some papers today, the article could probably be found with an internet search.

Cultural impact? Probably mostly to those folks who were present, unless the researcher came up with something I never heard about.

Quote: pacomartin

I don't remember 100 Years of Solitude using improbability as a plot device. I remember that history is very repetitive.

i was thinking of instances where improbabilities were manifested as magical realism.

I like the Warren Buffet story.

In 1931 Ripley's Believe it or Not published the story of Tecumseh's curse. Tecumseh was a native American leader who on November 7, 1811, was attacked by United States forces led by Governor William Henry Harrison of the Indiana Territory and forces of Tecumseh's growing American Indian confederation led by his younger brother Tenskwatawa.Tecumseh would die two years later supposedly leaving a curse.

William Harrison ran for president in 1840. For the first time in history there was a nationwide modern campaign for the president. Harrison was elected and gave his inauguration speech in the rain without a hat and died 33 days later. But the curse of Tecumsah would extend to every president who was elected in 20 year intervals. They were destined to die in office.

1860 Abraham Lincoln elected, and he assassinated in office after his second election
1880 James A. Garfield elected and is assassinated in office after less than a year later
1900 William McKinley elected for his 2nd term and is assassinated in office after less than a year later
1920 Warren G. Harding elected and dies of a probable heart attack before finishing 3 years

Now that the "curse was getting well known because of the Ripley's Believe it or Not people became on the lookout

1940 Franklin D. Roosevelt is elected for the 3rd time, and would later die in office of Cerebral hemorrhage after his 4th election
1960 John F. Kennedy is assassinated
1980 Ronald Reagan is shot by John F Hinckley. The true believer point out that he would have died if medicine had not advanced since Tecumsah's time

2000 George W Bush has no close calls with death. The curse is broken!

Jimmy Carter was asked on the campaign trail if he feared the curse. The only exception to the rule was President Zachary Taylor, who was elected in 1848 and died in 1850.


People have asked me many times what is the probability that this could occur by accident? My answer is always that you can't scientifically correlate unrelated data.

However it remains one of the bits of Americana that millions of people believe. The support for the belief is the improbability that this could be accidental. The single exception is unimportant to these people since the curse never specified that a president could not die in office for some other reason.