奇跡定律：因為不存在而存在

You might be walking along the street and see a bald eagle swooping down to ride on the back of a tortoise? And you're like, "Huh, what are the chances?" Or say you're running late to a dentist appointment but somehow you get all green lights on your trip and so you make it to her office on time. Amazing, right? Are the odds in both cases really that astounding that they're miraculous?

你本來在大街上走著，突然看到一只禿鷹俯沖下來騎在烏龜的背上。這時，你可能會感嘆：“這種事的概率也太小了吧!”?；蛘弑緛砟闳タ囱泪t(yī)要遲到了，但是不知怎么的，你一路綠燈按時趕到了牙醫(yī)的診所。這聽起來真的很不可思議，對吧?難道奇跡發(fā)生的幾率真的那么驚人嗎?

Math professor John Littlewood's law of miracles is pretty specific. First off, it says that we should expect a miracle every 35 days -- which seems like decent odds! Most of us, after all, would probably settle for a miracle a couple of times a year -- even once, perhaps, if it was a good enough one. Littlewood also defined a miracle as something that has a one in a million chance of happening. He based his calculation on the assumption that the typical person is awake and alert eight hours a day (not counting sleep time and time spent in mindless activities like watching reruns of "The Simpsons") and that events occur at an approximate rate of one per second .

數學教授約翰·利特伍德總結出了“奇跡定律”，內容可以說是非常具體：大概每35天，我們的生活中就會出現一次奇跡。這聽起來似乎不錯，畢竟真是這樣的話，我們大多數人可能每年都會碰到好幾次奇跡。利特伍德還把奇跡定義為“發(fā)生幾率為百萬分之一的事件”，他的計算基于這樣一種假設：一個普通人每天有8小時保持著清醒和警覺的狀態(tài)，事件發(fā)生的頻率大約為每秒一次。

So that's all fine and good, but a larger question remains. Mainly, how the heck did a Cambridge University professor come up with some sort of equation to determine a rather spiritual and not wholly objective number? Littlewood was joking.

這一切雖然聽起來都很棒，但其實有大問題。一位劍橋大學的數學教授是如何用某種方程式來確定一些虛無縹緲的東西呢?數學不應該是嚴謹的客觀事實嗎?其實，這一切只是因為他在開玩笑。

Yep, when he was creating equations for such a "law," he wasn't doing it to prove that miracles are real and we should all be writing in our gratitude journals and saying "namaste" all the time. He was actually saying the opposite: If we think that a one-in-a-million chance of something is a miracle, then take a look at how often miracles happen. And instead of saying how improbable it is, you should probably consider your miracle nothing more than a coincidence -- which happens a lot.

當利特伍德為所謂的“奇跡定律”建立方程式時，他并不是為了證明奇跡是真實存在的。他實際上是在說反話：如果我們認為百萬分之一幾率會發(fā)生的事就是一個奇跡，那么看看奇跡發(fā)生的頻率有多高吧!所謂的奇跡只不過是一個巧合，而巧合其實經常發(fā)生。

Strangely, it was a 2004 New York Review of Books article critiquing another book ("Debunked!" by Georges Charpak and Henri Broch) that seems to have grown the legend of Littlewood's miracles. In the review, author Freeman Dyson uses Littlewood's equations to bolster an opinion that paranormal phenomena could be real .

至于你要問為什么利特伍德的“奇跡定律”會這么火熱，這是因為2004年《紐約書評》上的一篇文章批評了一本名為《揭穿!》的書，在這篇文章中，作者戴森利用利特伍德的方程式證明超自然現象可能是存在的。

But let's reiterate: Littlewood was actually kind of making fun of those who thought miracles were, well, miraculous. Don't blame him for his law.

但是，讓我們再次重申一下：利特伍德實際上是在用他的“奇跡定律”取笑那些相信奇跡的人。