coincidence is just the universe's way of working anonymously.

[SobaViolence]

ponder & discuss.

[monkey]

wouldnt it be the other way around?

[Lex Diamonds]

This statement implies that the Universe is a sentient being, a notion which I take issue with. The very creation of the Universe itself, in my opinion, was an act of coincidence.

[SobaViolence]

what if it has always been?


pauli, another way of saying it: the universe works anonymously through the phenomena of coincidence.

[Lex Diamonds]

what if it has always been?
Everything has a beginning. The Universe, encapsulating everything else, especially so. It is possible to put an age on everything, at least to the extent of young and old. The Universe is old, but it is not ageless.

[monkey]

what if it has always been?


pauli, another way of saying it: the universe works anonymously through the phenomena of coincidence.

no no, what i meant is, the universe always works anonymously BUT coincidences is when we notice it.

[SobaViolence]

what if its age is beyond human understanding?

it's so old, we can't grasp it.

?

i don't think coincidences are noticed for the most part. so i'd have to disagree with you.
if you're looking than you can see it, but en masse, human beings are pretty short sighted.

[Planetary]

TIME IS AN INANIMATE OBJECT!

[Waus]

Let me get this straight - you were planting photos of yourself in the gallery?

[Planetary]

TIME IS AN INANIMATE OBJECT!
running and passing and passing and running.

[Lex Diamonds]

what if its age is beyond human understanding?

it's so old, we can't grasp it.
Regardless, it still has a beginning.

[monkey]

what if its age is beyond human understanding?

it's so old, we can't grasp it.

?

i don't think coincidences are noticed for the most part. so i'd have to disagree with you.
if you're looking than you can see it, but en masse, human beings are pretty short sighted.

but when you think about it... and obviously you do... why do you do it?

people dont realize little connections until "the big coincidence" hits them. that's when most people, even the stupider ones, will consider the universe and the nature of coincidences. i think there's an entire section of science and nature that we do not have the capacity to understand. but the fun part is trying.

[fucktopgirl]

Regardless, it still has a beginning.

yea the big bang but what i dont understand is where does all thet energy from the big bang came?It must come from something!So therefore,something exist prior to the big bang!?

[Ace42X]

From The Science of Discworld (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0091886570/qid=1149700401/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/203-4188228-0726366):

Gut feelings are worse than useless, because human beings have a rather poor intuition for random events. Many people believe that lottery numbers that have so far been neglected are more likely to come up in the future. But the lottery machine has no 'memory' - its future is independent of its past. Those coloured plastic balls do not know how often they have come up in previous draws, and they have no tendency to compensate for past imbalances.

Why do we find coincidences so striking? Because we expect random events to be evenly distributed, so statistical clumps surprise us (...) six random numbers between 1 and 49 are more likely to be clumpy than not.
How do we know this? Probability theorists tackle such questions using 'sample spaces', - a conceptual space that organizes all possibilities. A sample space contains not just the event that concerns us, but all other possible alternatives

The probability of all four players getting a perfect hand [in bridge] at the same time is so microscopic that even if every planet in the galaxy had a billion inhabitants, all playing bridge every day for a billion years, you wouldn't expect it to happen.
Nevertheless, every so often the newspapers report a four-way perfect hand. The sensible conclusion is NOT that a miracle happened, but that something changed the odds. (...) [A] way to be fooled about a coincidence is to be unaware of hidden constraints that limit the sample space. That 'perfect hand' could perhaps be explained by the way bridge players often shuffle cards for their next deal, which can be summed up as: poorly. If a pack of cards is arranged so that the top four cards consist of one from each suit, and thereafter every fourth card is the same suit, then you can cut (but not shuffle, admittedly) the pack as many times as you like, and it will deal out a four-way perfect hand. At the end of a game, the cards lie on the table in a fairly ordered manner, not a random one - so it's not surprising if they possess a degree of structure after they've been picked up.
So even with a mathemtically tidy example like bridge, the choice of the 'right' sample space is not entirely straightforward. The actual sample space is 'packs of cards of the kind that bridge players habitually assemble after concluding a game', NOT 'all possible packs of cards'. That changes the odds.

Nature's sample space is often bigger than a conventional statistician would expect. (...) [There is] an extremely important factor - 'selective reporting'

And so it goes on.

[SobaViolence]

Ace, as my great grandmother told my dad, 'Either you believe or you don't- pass the milk.'

why do you do it?

i don't know...that's where my brain often wanders.


there's been some many times where random occurances have led to oppertunities and gained wisdom, i can't shrug it aside.

[HAL 9000]

yea the big bang but what i dont understand is where does all thet energy from the big bang came?It must come from something!So therefore,something exist prior to the big bang!?
This is a very astute point; The First Law of Thermodynamics basically says that the total energy in a closed system is a constant – in other words energy can not be created or destroyed, just converted from one form to another (ignoring silly quantum mechanics for now).

The idea of the instantaneous creation of the universe in a big bang would seem initially to be in violation of this principle. As you say that energy must come from something.

The catch seems to be that the moment of creation created everything – that includes time, this means that the thermodynamics laws are not violated because their was no ‘time’ when the universe contained a different amount of energy to what it does now.

The difficult thing to imagine is that it is not valid to ask what was before the big bang because without the big bang the concept of before is meaningless. There is no before only after. When struggling with a difficult concept in more than 3 dimensions, I like to try and reduce it to a more manageable 2 or 3 dimension problem. Instead of asking what was before the big bang, ask yourself what is north of the North Pole and I think you will get the idea.

As for the coincidence thing, I don’t buy it, Ace’s last Discworld quote says it all.

[Ace42X]

The catch seems to be that the moment of creation created everything – that includes time, this means that the thermodynamics laws are not violated because their was no ‘time’ when the universe contained a different amount of energy to what it does now.

Indeed, before the big bang there was no space-time for anything to exist in. Think of the universe being like a hollow inside a solid block of metal, or concrete. Before the big-bang there was no space(time) there, the block was completely solid. It is not that there was an incredibly tiny winy bit of space, an almost invisibly tiny air-bubble in the middle of a solid lump, because there wasn't. It was 100% solid. At the moment of the "big bang" space(time) was created, and as such there was an area where things, including matter, could exist.

[Rawr]

I don't really get what thing your trying to explain but if I'm right.....For me I don't know. The only people who know this, the whole secret of the universe..the whole thing about it is that only the mental 'crazies' know the secret, it's just that no human or being can handle knowing it they go over the edge and are so psycho it's impossible to understand when they try to tell you. Atleast that's one thought...
Besides, everything is an illushion anyways..no matter how 'real' things seem it is all a illushion no matter what. It's all in our minds, that's why when we die our minds shut off and everything slips....like I said, it's all in our minds.

[ma belle]

when i die i ain't shutting off or slipping away, just transforming beyond matter.

Maybe it wasn't so much the big bang as the big reshuffle.

all information exists whether we can know it intellectually or not. it is not beyond experience. science itself isn't a thing... scientists doesn't really know anything compared to what they don't know - but are great at sounding as if they know everything - this was true hundreds of years ago for people who we now basically laugh at for their ideas and so will it be in the future. science changes but fiction remains.

your brain patterns events. if you make something relevant it becomes more so in your universe. if you look for 'coincidences' they appear more.

[marsdaddy]

A friend of mine told me the other day, "I don't believe in coincidences". I guess, the population of my world being so small, random acts can coincide to create "coincidences." But I think she believes someone or something has a master plan.

It sounds comforting, but dubious.

[wanton wench]

read a lil about quantum mechanics and this new string theory. very interesting stuff.