What are the chances--even or astronomical?

Stephen Hawkings, the most lovable physicist since Albert Einstein, was born on the 300^th anniversary of Galileo’s death, and died this Wednesday, March 14—Einstein’s birthday. See the obit.

I’ve often enough struck by coincidences. I’ll be reading, and I’ll be struck by a word, say fatuity, and let it linger on my lips, savoring it, and a second after pronouncing aloud I’ll hear it on TV—a pundit scoffing at the fatuity of a particular politician.

Everyone has such experiences, with varying degrees of regularity. They happen to me all the time: a word or a phrase will lodge in my consciousness, for the mere moment required for it to recur, on a billboard, on the side of a building, in someone’s remark. Every time, I’m baffled. What are the chances?

Perhaps I’m a connoisseur of coincidence? If you read more than the average person, you take in that many more words and impressions, which means that you’re more susceptible to these echoes. But now I find myself actually anticipating the phenomena, the adumbration or repetition of a rare word or thought, splendid in itself but doubly so when cloned.

Besides the pleasure to be derived from these incidents, I also feel an occasional small shiver of terror. Just who is directing the effects? Einstein said that coincidences were God’s way of remaining anonymous.

But: Taking the word coincidence to mean the simultaneous occurrence of separate events, then there are an almost infinite number of coincidences happening every second, aren’t there? An individual’s consciousness is simply the mediator between these events, forging connections that would not have existed otherwise.

Maybe the wonder is that coincidences don’t assail us at every turn. I may flatter myself that I’m more finely attuned to them because of my bustling mental life, but isn’t it probably the case that the man preoccupied, so to speak, with fewer thoughts would be more susceptible to coincidence, to the happenstance of one event, out of the multitude of events impinging on his consciousness every hour, lining up exactly with one of the thought-events in his head?

If you were to think about your high-school English teacher, for example, were to maintain an image of her in your mind to the exclusion of all other images, and then happened to cross paths with her, it would constitute a coincidence, but not an extraordinary one. Even the instance of two repetitions of the word fatuity, out of the thousands—millions?—of fragmentary and fleeting thought-events occurring every day, coinciding and then registering on one’s consciousness, while exceedingly more rare, is no more fantastic.