奇迹定律：因为不存在而存在

You might be walking along the street and see a bald eagle swooping down to ride on the back of a tortoise? And you're like, "Huh, what are the chances?" Or say you're running late to a dentist appointment but somehow you get all green lights on your trip and so you make it to her office on time. Amazing, right? Are the odds in both cases really that astounding that they're miraculous?

你本来在大街上走着，突然看到一只秃鹰俯冲下来骑在乌龟的背上。这时，你可能会感叹：“这种事的概率也太小了吧!”。或者本来你去看牙医要迟到了，但是不知怎么的，你一路绿灯按时赶到了牙医的诊所。这听起来真的很不可思议，对吧?难道奇迹发生的几率真的那么惊人吗?

Math professor John Littlewood's law of miracles is pretty specific. First off, it says that we should expect a miracle every 35 days -- which seems like decent odds! Most of us, after all, would probably settle for a miracle a couple of times a year -- even once, perhaps, if it was a good enough one. Littlewood also defined a miracle as something that has a one in a million chance of happening. He based his calculation on the assumption that the typical person is awake and alert eight hours a day (not counting sleep time and time spent in mindless activities like watching reruns of "The Simpsons") and that events occur at an approximate rate of one per second .

数学教授约翰·利特伍德总结出了“奇迹定律”，内容可以说是非常具体：大概每35天，我们的生活中就会出现一次奇迹。这听起来似乎不错，毕竟真是这样的话，我们大多数人可能每年都会碰到好几次奇迹。利特伍德还把奇迹定义为“发生几率为百万分之一的事件”，他的计算基于这样一种假设：一个普通人每天有8小时保持着清醒和警觉的状态，事件发生的频率大约为每秒一次。

So that's all fine and good, but a larger question remains. Mainly, how the heck did a Cambridge University professor come up with some sort of equation to determine a rather spiritual and not wholly objective number? Littlewood was joking.

这一切虽然听起来都很棒，但其实有大问题。一位剑桥大学的数学教授是如何用某种方程式来确定一些虚无缥缈的东西呢?数学不应该是严谨的客观事实吗?其实，这一切只是因为他在开玩笑。

Yep, when he was creating equations for such a "law," he wasn't doing it to prove that miracles are real and we should all be writing in our gratitude journals and saying "namaste" all the time. He was actually saying the opposite: If we think that a one-in-a-million chance of something is a miracle, then take a look at how often miracles happen. And instead of saying how improbable it is, you should probably consider your miracle nothing more than a coincidence -- which happens a lot.

当利特伍德为所谓的“奇迹定律”建立方程式时，他并不是为了证明奇迹是真实存在的。他实际上是在说反话：如果我们认为百万分之一几率会发生的事就是一个奇迹，那么看看奇迹发生的频率有多高吧!所谓的奇迹只不过是一个巧合，而巧合其实经常发生。

Strangely, it was a 2004 New York Review of Books article critiquing another book ("Debunked!" by Georges Charpak and Henri Broch) that seems to have grown the legend of Littlewood's miracles. In the review, author Freeman Dyson uses Littlewood's equations to bolster an opinion that paranormal phenomena could be real .

至于你要问为什么利特伍德的“奇迹定律”会这么火热，这是因为2004年《纽约书评》上的一篇文章批评了一本名为《揭穿!》的书，在这篇文章中，作者戴森利用利特伍德的方程式证明超自然现象可能是存在的。

But let's reiterate: Littlewood was actually kind of making fun of those who thought miracles were, well, miraculous. Don't blame him for his law.

但是，让我们再次重申一下：利特伍德实际上是在用他的“奇迹定律”取笑那些相信奇迹的人。