Coincidance - Principia Discordia

148 COINCIDANCE
Synchronous events have long fascinated leading scientists.
Are these unexpected occurrences ...
MERE
COINCIDENCE?
For over 100 years, various heretical scientists have been studying the
so-called paranormal—strange events that are attributed to extrasensory
perception, precognition or telekinesis. And, every step of the way, this
research has been attacked by critics who explain the positive results as
"mere coincidence" or (even worse) "sheer coincidence." Now there appears
to be a possibility that coincidence may be more important scientifically—
and may change our scientific paradigm much more radically—than
telepathy would. Coincidence may be more earthshaking than telekinesis.
There have been coincidences so dramatic, so symbolic or so wildly
improbably that they have aroused feelings of the uncanny in scientists and
laymen alike for generations.
Could such things happen by chance alone? There must, it seems to
some, be an underlying logic to these bizarre juxtapositions of events in time
and space. Among those who have seriously considered the logic of
coincidence was Paul Kammerer, the German biologist who was one of the
last of the Lamarckian evolutionists. (Kammerer killed himself soon after
one of his crucial experiments in support of Lamarckian evolution was
found to be a fraud. Einstein, however, was impressed with Kammerer's
work on coincidence, calling it "original and by no means absurd.") Other
interested scientists have included Carl Gustav Jung, disciple of Freud and
one of the great psychologists of the century, who mapped the unconscious
mind with an eye to the mystical; and Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel laureate
physicist and discoverer of the neutrino who, in the words of Arthur
Koestler in The Roots of Coincidence, extended "the principle of noncausal events
from microphysics (where its legitimacy was recognized) to macrophysics
(where it was not)."
Let us examine a few cases, moving gradually from the only moderately
peculiar to the increasingly bizarre.
1. English novelist Dame Rebecca West was writing a story in which a girl
finds a hedgehog in her garden. As West wrote this passage, she was
interrupted by servants who informed her they had just found a hedgehog
in the garden.