Reviewed by Robert A. Charman
Firstly, some improbable experiences. In the summer of 1972 the actor Anthony Hopkins was engaged to play the lead in a film based upon George Feifers’s 1971 novel The Girl from Petrovka. To his frustration, none of the London bookshops he visited had a copy. While waiting for an underground train at Leicester Square tube station he sat down on a platform seat and noticed a discarded book on the seat next to him. Picking it up it he saw that it was The Girl from Petrovka. Some time later he met the author and told him the story. Feifer said that in November 1971 he had lent a copy, which he had annotated to change British English to American English for American publication, to a friend, who had lost it in Bayswater and yes, it was the same copy. In February 1918, Major Summerford was knocked off his horse by lightning, suffering temporary paralysis of his legs. In 1924 while sheltering under a tree he was hit again, suffering temporary paralysis of his right side. In 1930 he suffered temporary complete paralysis after being struck while walking in a park. He died in 1932 and in 1936 his was the one headstone in the graveyard that was struck by lightning. Mr Gould fell off his ladder and broke his left leg at about the same time as his son broke his left leg jumping over a wall. Each of a mother’s successive four daughters was born on 3rd August.
Most remarkable of all is the story Hand has taken from Jung’s Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. In the early summer of 1914 a German mother took a photograph of her young son during a day out in the Black Forest. She took the film to be developed in nearby Strasbourg, the French city on the Franco-German border, but with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 was unable to return and collect it. Following the birth of a daughter in 1916 and now living in Frankfurt some 170 km north of Strasbourg, she bought another film to photograph her daughter. When it was developed it was found to be doubly exposed and underneath was the photograph she had taken of her son in 1914. It had somehow got back into general circulation as a new film and had been in a batch bought by the photography shop in Frankfurt. As there is no reference to this being a roll of film, in which case every shot would have been doubly exposed, it sounds as if the mother used single sheet film mounted upon a sheet of acetate and it was this particular sheet in its protective cover that had been inadvertently returned to unused stock and sold on.
The list of incredibly unlikely experiences is probably endless, from the same person winning the lottery twice to a clock stopping at the exact moment its owner dies. Spooky explanations abound but David Hand, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, Imperial College, London will have none of it, as all can be explained as a consequence of what he has termed the Improbability Principle. This states that extremely improbable events are commonplace. By this he means that if an event can happen then sooner or later it will happen because this is just the way our universe is. From the presumably improbable Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago, to the exact fine tuning of each of the fundamental constants of physics without which the galaxies and we would not be here, to the Earth being the right size, containing the right elements, having the right magnetic field, the right temperature range and being the right distance from the sun with the right-sized moon at the right distance within a correctly spacedout planetary system to support the creation of life some 3.6 billion years ago, to all the evolutionary history of life forms to date. The sheer improbability of all this happening is beyond computation but it has happened and the consequences will continue to happen.
To give just one example of statistical improbability: there are twenty amino acids available to make enzyme molecules. A typical molecule consists of several hundred amino acids. The probability that, say, one hundred amino acids will spontaneously interact to form a particular enzyme is 1 in 20 × 20 × 20 . . . 100 times or 1 in 20100 which is more than the number of subatomic particles in the universe, yet there are some 3,000 different enzymes in every cell of the body. Scientific laws are summaries of what scientific observation has discovered about how the universe behaves and statistically speaking they can be considered as summaries of probabilities. These range from the ‘infinitely improbable’ of a die falling onto a horizontal flat surface with two faces uppermost because this is just not possible, to the ‘infinitely probable’ of a die landing on a flat surface with one face uppermost. We live in a probabilistic universe of the possible.
The Improbability Principle of the title, says Hand, is the outcome of several interacting statistical laws such as the law of inevitability, which says that something must happen; the law of truly large numbers, which says that, however unlikely a particular event is, it will happen if the population from which it is drawn is large enough; the law of the probability lever that says that a slight change in the initial circumstances can have a huge impact on the outcome of subsequent probabilities (the butterfly effect); the law of near enough which says that events or measurements that are sufficiently similar can be regarded for all practical purposes as identical, and the law of selection which says that you can make probabilities as high as you like if you assess after the event. Conspiracy theories depend upon hindsight selection of probabilities to suit that theory from all the probabilities actually present at the time. The author devotes a chapter to each law with many worked examples including a penchant for the probabilities for different outcomes of dice throwing. He writes very engagingly with a nice touch of humour. There is no sense of being talked down to and his book has opened my eyes to how probability theory can explain a huge range of happenings in everyday life and the workings of society, let alone the wider universe.
What Journal of the Society for Psychical Research readers will want to know is how the status of parapsychology fares in Professor Hand’s interpretation of this probabilistic world, both with regard to anecdotal accounts and laboratory research. As far as he is concerned it seems that whatever your psychic experience, from apparently precognitive dreams, to seeing a night-time apparition of your aunt at the time of her death, to being aware that your twin is in peril, they all fall into the category of ‘what can happen will happen’ including your sense of surprise because the happening seemed so unlikely to you. As for parapsychology experiments involving quantitative results and outcome statistics, the author says that “Unfortunately, the scientific consensus is that there is no convincing evidence in favour of paranormal abilities — a US National Academy of Sciences report concluded that there was ‘no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena’ ”. He then goes on to say, “One hundred and thirty years! A testament to the power of hope over experience if ever there was one.”
Hand quotes John Scarne, an expert on dice who has criticised J. B. Rhine’s psychokinetic (PK) experiments with dice as flawed because he used shopbought dice with possible face biases and therefore non-random outcomes instead of perfectly machined dice used in casinos. This charge is only partly true. Rhine did use shop-bought dice at first, then realising the possibility of artefact bias changed to casino dice, with which he obtained similar positive outcomes (Irwin, 2004, pp.108–109). The 1933/34 high scoring Pearce–Pratt card-guessing series carried out in Rhine’s laboratory was, thinks Hand, probably obtained through unsuspected deception because Hubert Pearce’s scoring remained high “Except, that is, when a magician watched him guess the cards, at which point his performance fell to chance levels” (no source quoted). Well, if he was present this score-killing magician seems to have been invisible to all around him as he is not mentioned as the cause of Pearce’s sudden decline in scoring by anyone else. According to Hubert’s son Warren Pearce, his father, who was a young divinity student at the time of the tests, was shocked to receive an unexpected ‘Dear John’ letter from a girlfriend finishing their relationship, and in his distress he lost his high-scoring ability never to regain it. In his detailed analysis of the Pearce–Pratt card-scoring statistics Irwin accepts their being far beyond chance as an explanation and says that Pearce suddenly lost his ability after some “emotional strain” (Irwin, 2004, pp.61–64).
Hand devotes several pages to a large ESP experiment carried out by the eminent marine biologist Alister Hardy and colleagues, in which over several evenings 200 people took part, sitting in a large hall under the careful supervision of assistants walking up and down the rows. They took turns in being active ‘senders’ and passive ‘receivers’ of pictures seen by the ‘senders’. For each of a series of tests 180 ‘senders’ saw pictures displayed at one end of the hall and tried to send them mentally to 20 ‘receivers’ sitting in individual screened cubicles. With paper and pen the ‘receivers’ attempted to draw or describe whatever image came into their minds when they heard a buzzer indicating that a picture was being shown. The proportion of close matches per test was then compared with randomly paired responses from other trials to establish a chance baseline and the test matches per test were found to be greater than the random-match controls (Hardy, 1973). “But,” says Hand, “simply being greater is not enough. We have to ask the deeper question: could the difference have arisen by chance?” Could they be accounted for by procedural flaws and unwitting use of the law of selection of data? According to Hand two statisticians have performed a particular statistical test on the data that can determine whether chance could explain the differences. They found that chance probably could and concluded that “the experiment offers no strong evidence for ESP or a hidden synchronous force”.
Carl Jung’s scarab beetle story, when a patient is telling him of a dream in which she was given a golden Egyptian scarab and a common rose chafer beetle hit the window at about the same time, receives very short statistical shrift. Hand points out that Eusapia Palladino was repeatedly caught out using her feet and long hairs to manipulate objects in the darkness of the séance room and remarks that “It may be relevant that she had married a conjuror when she was young”. He also points out that Randi publicly matched Uri Geller’s spoon bending tricks and no one has yet won Randi’s very fairminded challenge for anyone to demonstrate successfully any form of psychic ability and walk away with one million dollars. For Hand all attempts to explain the apparently paranormal through theories such as acausal synchronicity or morphic resonance are built upon paranormal sand. Randomness, chance and probability are the real factors behind all surprising ‘psychic’ experiences, which are surprising only because of the experient’s or later investigator’s limited knowledge of the factors resulting in that experience. As far as claims for the existence of psychic phenomena are concerned, Hand sums up his review of paranormal literature both anecdotal and experimental by saying that “No mysteries are required to explain them — no superstitions, no miracles, no gods, no supernatural interventions or psychic powers, no synchronicity, seriality, morphic resonance or any of the host of other imaginary imps. All that is needed are the basic laws of probability” (p.40, italics added). No sitting on the psychic fence of ‘maybe’ for him.
Hand’s argument — that all claims for the paranormal as an explanation for anything are destined to fail on grounds of the Improbability Principle — is in line with the a priori view of the mainstream science community that ESP phenomena are as impossible in principle, and therefore in practice, as a die landing with two faces up. But this argument is based upon the properties of the inferred world of physical reality as explored by physics and the hard sciences. What is overlooked is that it is this inferred reality upon which Hand’s interpretation of what is possible and impossible is based. It can offer no explanation for the existence of the subjective experiential reality of conscious thought and intention in which he wrote the book. In inferred physical reality subjective reality is impossible. Being different in kind, the two realities are not commensurate so neither can be used to predicate the existence of the other. The properties of mind are not constrained by the properties of the physical brain so may well include the possibility of paranormal phenomena. Professor Jessica Utts, Chair, Department of Statistics, University of California, Irvine, takes a very different viewpoint from Hand regarding the interpretation of chance and probability concerning the findings of research into parapsychology. Her conclusion is that there is a real possibility that paranormal phenomena do occur in our experiential reality (Utts, 2015). Apart from Hand’s mainstream dismissal of the paranormal, if you want to gain some understanding of how probability theory works in everyday life, from the probability that two members in a group of twenty-three will share a birthday to high finance and the stock market, then this is an excellent introduction.
References
Hardy, A, Harvie, R. & Koestler, A. (1973). The Challenge of Chance: Experiments and Speculations. London, Hutchinson.
Irwin, H. J. (2004) An Introduction to Parapsychology. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Utts, J. (2015) The Significance of Statistics in Mind–Matter Research. In D. Broderick & B. Goertzel (Eds.). Evidence for Psi: Thirteen Empirical Research Reports. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Robert A. Charman can be reached at email: [email protected]
This review first appeared in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research Vol 79(2).