The Engineering of Coincidence

THE ENGINEERING

OF COINCIDENCE

a scientific explanation of magic

Robert Ramsay

Copyright © 2019 Robert Ramsay

ePub Edition

Cover art from 123rf.com

Internal art from Wikipedia and 123rf.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Like my album Confound and Disturb, this book contains two swears, and one reference to masturbation.

http://www.robertramsay.org

"One man's 'magic' is another man's engineering.

'Supernatural' is a null word."

― Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

It's still magic even if you know how it's done.

― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

Introduction

Tomorrow, you have a job interview. It's for your dream job; not only have you wanted this job for a long time, you know in your heart of hearts that you can do it better than anyone. Interviews can go badly, though. Interviewers can be bad tempered. They might hate your tie.

You need something extra. You need good luck. You might carry a lucky charm. You might sleep with your CV under your pillow. You find some object, some act, that represents your desired success.

The day comes, and the interview goes really well. On your way home, you get a call - you got the job! As you put your phone back in your pocket, you feel the lucky charm, you remember the CV under the pillow. You have used magical techniques to bring you the luck you needed.

Naturally, this is usually dismissed as superstitious rubbish; how could there be any rational explanation of such a thing? And yet bookshops are full of books about this ‘magic’. They call themselves ‘self-help’, ‘spiritual guidance’ or even ‘management skills’, but ultimately, magic is what they rely on. These books are united by one thing: they all tell you how to do the magic, in a thousand different ways, but none of them really explain how this life-changing power works, and the reason for that is simple.

They don’t know.

The subject of this book is magic, and the purpose of it is to explain how it works.

At the age of twenty-three, I was feeling depressed and aimless about my future. I’d recently been made redundant, and although I was lucky enough to get a new job soon after, being unemployed made me think hard about what I wanted to achieve with my life, since I didn’t feel that I’d achieved a great deal thus far. A friend of mine had got some free tickets to see the film Dead Poets Society, starring Robin Williams, about a schoolteacher who inspires his class to make something of their lives. Seeing this film was like a lightning bolt passing through me; the inspiration that Robin Williams’ character brought out in the students was the same inspiration that was suddenly kindled in me. I came out of the cinema vowing to Carpe Diem (Latin for seize the day) (not realising that this was originally Romantic Poet code for Time’s short; let’s fuck!).

I was realistic enough about my abilities to know that I would never be world-class at any of the things I liked to do. I was not going to be the next Picasso, the next Hendrix, the next Hemingway. I realised my only choice was to dedicate myself to doing something that no-one else had done yet.

I’ve always been interested in finding out how things work; I learned to read quite early, and a set of children’s science encyclopedias was one of my first presents. The idea that it was possible to explain the mysteries of the world using science was a thrilling and seductive notion for me. In parallel with this, I enjoyed reading ghost stories, both fictional and reported. The sense of mystery that these stories gave me was very similar to the thrill I got from reading about science. As time went on, I discovered that ghosts weren’t the only phenomena that people claimed to have experienced that seemed to be outside the field of science. Telekinesis, telepathy, remote viewing, and, most of all, incredible coincidences that people seemed to have created, either accidentally, or by strange rituals. And I wasn’t the only person to show serious interest in these seemingly inexplicable things.

Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist, had a patient whose treatment he was struggling with, because whatever the subject, she always knew better. At one point, she was describing a dream in which a friend gave her a piece of jewellery shaped like a golden scarab. At that moment, Jung heard a tapping on the window behind him. When he opened the window, a large insect flew in. Jung caught the insect, and found that it was a rose-chafer beetle, of an iridescent gold-green colour. He handed it to the woman, saying Here is your scarab. It was an enormous shock to her, and as Jung dryly observed: The treatment could now begin with satisfactory results.

Jung went on to collaborate with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli on a theory of coincidence he called ‘synchronicity’, proposing that what we see as coincidences are surface manifestations of a deeper level of reality. Jung claimed that telepathy, clairvoyance etc. were all examples of synchronicity. So synchronicity was considered not just to be passive like the appearance of the scarab - it could somehow be directed to make these paranormal events occur.

There were even fringe groups of scientists (although many of the scientists themselves, like Pauli, were quite famous and respected in other fields) that investigated these kind of events, and had been doing so since the end of the 19th century. They called it parapsychology, believing that these seemingly inexplicable occurrences were caused by hitherto untapped powers of the human mind, and they set up various parapsychological societies to study these powers. By the time I joined one of these societies (the SPR - the Society for Psychical Research), scientists and investigators of various stripes had been producing papers on the subject of parapsychology for almost a hundred years. I vividly remember the first time I looked through the SPR Library; there were shelves and shelves of investigations, papers; so much documentation, from all over the world, that I thought to myself: There has to be something to this; something real.

I came to the conclusion that if these events really happen, and aren’t just hoaxes or figments of peoples’ imaginations, then there had to be an undiscovered scientific explanation behind them. If Jung were correct, it should be possible to manipulate synchronicity; to interact with a deeper level of reality. You could take advantage of naturally occurring events to ‘make things happen’. Normally, this would be described as ‘magic’. I would be searching for the scientific explanation of magic; this was the thing that no-one had done yet. And if I found a convincing explanation that showed that it didn’t exist? That would also be a success.

So, when I talk about magic; what am I really talking about?

I’m not talking about stage magic where a lot of skill and hard work goes into making seemingly impossible things appear to happen. Watches disappear and reappear, people are sawn in half, and the playing card that you chose a minute ago seems to have travelled halfway round the world. None of this involves paranormal powers - they are called magic tricks because that is exactly what is happening; we are being tricked and we know it, and that is what makes stage magic so entertaining.

At the same time, I’m not talking about the kind of magic that we see in film and on TV where people turn into dragons or fling fireballs at each other, in clear violation of all known laws of physics. This is massively unrealistic and has severely affected our expectations of actual magic. As we shall see, real wizards are, unfortunately, not as exciting and powerful as pretend wizards. To paraphrase Bill S. Preston Esq.: We were heinously lied to by our album covers!

The 20th century magician Aleister Crowley (described both as ‘Magic’s Picasso’ and ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’) defined magic as causing change to occur in accordance with one’s Will. This turns out to be a very smart definition, since it covers two kinds of change; normal actions (potato farming and tax collecting were two of Crowley’s examples) and the kind of ‘making things happen’ that we normally associate with ‘magical magic’, such as performing a secret ritual of some kind to get that new job.

Crowley underlined this by saying Every intentional act is a Magickal Act. He also spelled it with a ‘k’ (as it was in occult treatises of the 1600’s) to avoid confusion with stage magic. (I’m not going to bother following Crowley’s spelling, as I’m hoping this introduction will suffice to dispel any confusion about what sort of magic I’m talking about.)

Normally, we decide to do something, and we act on it without considering it to be anything