“People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence.”
" The Planet that Wasn't http://geobeck.tripod.com/frontier/planet.htm" originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (May 1975) <br class="br">General sources <br class="br">Context: People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.
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Isaac Asimov303
American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston Uni… 1920–1992Related quotes
Charles Stross book Singularity Sky
Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 6, “Telegram from the Dead” (p. 139)
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)
Source: (1940), XVIII
“I’m not accusing you of anything, but we both have studied too much history to ignore coincidence.”
Lawrence M. Schoen (1959) American writer and klingonist
Source: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard (2015), Chapter 17, “Dead Voices” (p. 170)
“There is no coincidence. Only the illusion of coincidence.”
Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books
Source: V for Vendetta, Vol. III of X
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist
Letter to Farkas Bolyai, on his son János Bolyai's 1832 publishings on non-Euclidean geometry.
Ivars Peterson (1948) Canadian mathematician
Source: The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997), Chapter 10, “Lifetimes of Chance” (p. 188)