Coincidence Read Online Free PDF Page A

coincidence can be trivial,
     in fact usually is; or it can change your life—like the woman who picked up a phone and got a crossed line, and found herself
     listening to her husband calling his mistress from the office.
    One man I know was given a coded flight reservation that was the same number as the license plate of his car, which he’d totaled
     the previous week. (He took the flight: Nothing happened.)
    When Sara and I first met she had two cats named Daisy and Alice, which also happened to be the names of my two nieces. We
     laughed about the coincidence, but didn’t regard it as an omen or anything like that.
    But what is coincidence? Is it anything more than fluke? Blind chance, indifferent and unconscious of the human fates that
     may hinge on it?
    Or is there more to it, something behind it?
    A while after coming across the Kennedy-Lincoln connection, I discovered there was a fancy word for unlikely coincidence.
     The word was”
synchronicity
,” and it was coined by the psychologist C. G. Jung, who, with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, published a treatise called Synchronicity:
An Acausal Connecting Principle
. That was in 1952.
    Surprisingly, there is still no mention in
Encyclopaedia Britannica
that these two remarkable men, despite being treated at length individually, ever knew each other. You will search the index
     in vain for any mention of synchronicity. In fact you will search pretty much the whole of scientific literature without success.
     It is an unsung collaboration between one man who created some of the most fundamental terms in which we think (including
     “introvert” and “extrovert,” as well as the “collective unconscious”) and another who made a vital contribution to quantum
     physics, which won him the Nobel Prize.
    Not exactly people in whose company you need feel embarrassed to be seen, I would have thought. Which makes the omission all
     the more curious.
    Twenty years ago the
Concise Oxford Dictionary
didn’t list the word either. Now it does, defining it as “The simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly
     related but have no discernible connection.”
    One reason for the word’s cautious emergence from the intellectual closet to which it had been consigned was Arthur Koestler’s
     book
The Roots of Coincidence
, published in 1972. In it he linked the idea to developments in modern physics such as quantum indeterminacy and probability
     theory, and traced it back to work done on “seriality” around the turn of the twentieth century. Seriality means things happening
     in clusters. The Chinese wrote about that centuries ago, and most people have experienced this in one form or another. Why,
     for example, do so many people believe that things happen in threes? (And even if they do, does it mean anything?)
    The following day I made a date to have lunch with my agent downtown. It was another pleasant fall day, so I decided to walk—at
     least part of the way. Somewhere on Madison and a little way below Fifty-seventh I began to feel like a need for a cup of
     coffee. Glancing at my watch, I saw that I had plenty of time, so I stopped at a small cafè that I didn’t remember ever having
     been in before, or for that matter ever having noticed.
    I slid into the first empty booth I came across. Someone had left a newspaper in the corner and I moved it out of my way.
     As I did so, I saw that it was folded open at a partially completed crossword. I don’t normally have much interest in crosswords,
     but for some reason this one caught my attention, and I thought I’d try finishing it off as I drank my coffee.
    Six across, I noticed, was filled in “Heartfelt.”
    More hearts. The card, the cake, now this. My interest moved up a notch.
    By the time I finished my coffee I’d finished the puzzle too. (It was no great intellectual feat; the paper was just one of
     the tabloids.) One clue had “Playwright Shaw’s first name,” which was George, which was