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How can someone really explain coincidence? It seems that the odds against certain things happening can be millions or billions to one yet sometimes these things do happen. We think about the chances of winning a giant lottery and we say to ourselves why bother to even get a ticket because the odds are sometimes one billion to one, yet most of the time there is a winner, and his or her odds were no better than ours. When we think about this situation we have to wonder how anyone can win with a billion to one odds against them it doesn't seem possible yet we realize that there will be a winner. The same can be said for almost anything. What are the odds that a certain person will be born? If we said that we wanted to take bets on the fact that a baby with all the certain genetic traits of a George Washington would have been born when good old George was, what would the odds have been? I think they may have been even greater than those billion to one lottery odds.

Sometimes people look at certain situations and they see a similarity to other situations and they compare the two, trying to show that there might be some strange connection between two events even though great amounts of time separate them. Look at all the comparisons between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Obviously both were presidents of the United States. Lincoln became president in 1860 while Kennedy became president in 1960. This is supposed to mean something but it is a bit of a stretch. Both their names contain seven letters. Not much of a coincidence here since most last names are not longer than about 9 letter and not shorter than about 5. This means that there was almost a 25% chance that their last names would have the same amount of letters and that there would be a very good chance that you could have found a president that had the same amount of letters in his last name as Lincoln or Kennedy. One could say that Johnson, both Andrew and Lyndon have seven letters in their last names. Both Lincoln's and Kennedy's wives lost children while they were in the White House. Both Lincoln and Kennedy were shot in the head and died and so on. These kinds of things can be taken to the extreme. For example you could say that both presidents were sitting down when shot or both bullets went into their hair or even both of their wives cried. I really don't believe forcing something to look like a coincidence creates a coincidence.

Did you know that if you did a random selection of twenty-three people, you would have a 50% chance that two of them would have the same birthday? It sounds crazy, we all know that there are 365 days in the year so you would think that you would need one more than half of that, or 184 days, but that is not true. To see the exact formula you can go to http://www.csicop.org/si/9809/coincidence.html (Copy and Paste the address into your browser's address bar) I don't want to get into the complicated math. So right away you can see that having two birthdays the same is not as big a coincidence as one would think.

If you really want to see a huge amount of coincidences you don't have to look any further than life on our planet. If Earth was a little closer to our Sun, or a little further away there might not be any life on this planet. If we didn't have just the right amount of elements, the exact atmosphere to shield us and allow us to breathe, we wouldn't be here either. Look at Mars, a barren desolate world. If we would have been on Mars, even if at some time in it's past it was inviting, we would all be, most likely, dead now.

Coincidence is stated when some rare connection exists between two or more events. When it is found out that this connection turns out to be a lot more common than first suspected then it is no longer labeled as coincidence. I wonder why this is? Who decides when something can be a coincidence and when it can't? If I find a dollar while I am out walking and then find another the next day this is a coincidence but if I find one every time I go out this supposedly is no longer a coincidence but something else. But would it be a coincidence if I found a dollar for four days straight or six days straight or even thirty days straight, where is the cut off and why is it there?

One famous story that shows what a lot of people think of as a strange coincidence is the one where two brothers in Finland, twins to be exact, were killed in separate bicycle accidents on the same day, on the same road and only two hours apart. This was big news in 2002 when it occurred. Even stranger there were another two brothers killed a year apart when they were riding mopeds in Bermuda. To make this even stranger, both were killed while on the same moped by the same taxi driver. This has to be considered really spooky and makes the connections between Lincoln and Kennedy seem trivial.

Could it be that subconsciously, many of us cause our own coincidences? Could the second brother have subconsciously sought out the same moped and then went in front of the same taxi cab? Who knows, even he might not have know he was doing this, although he must have been thinking about his brother when we took the same trip.

There is a story that was written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1838 titled "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket". It tells of four ship wrecked sailors who are adrift in a boat. They kill and eat the cabin boy to survive. Some forty years latter this event actually happened. Was it a coincidence or did they get the idea from reading the book?