In your recent book The Improbability Principle , you state that extremely unlikely events are commonplace. How so?
At first glance, it sounds like a contradiction: if something is highly improbable, how can it possibly be commonplace? But as you dig deeper you see it is not a contradiction, and that you should expect what appear to be extremely improbable events to occur quite often. The principle itself is really an interweaving of five fundamental laws.
Could you give an example of one of those laws?
Take the law of truly large numbers. The most obvious example of this is the lottery. In the UK you have a 1 in 14 million chance of winning if you buy just one ticket. But of course if you get enough people buying enough tickets it becomes almost inevitable that somebody somewhere will win. Another example is the chance of being struck by lightning. Around ...
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