| The Mother of Coincidence
|
From Mark Dionne
Someone wrote me, and mentioned this quote:
Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous
I hadn't heard it before, so I looked it up with Google. It was surprising how many people it was credited to, but the winners seemed to be Albert Einstein and Doris Lessing.I decided to count who was the winner. Albert got something like 33 hits with the quote written exactly as above. Doris got NONE. But if I look for the "coincidences are" variation, Doris gets about 36. Einstein gets NONE.
This is pretty interesting, suggesting that on one (or both?) branches of the history, there was an early misquote that has been perpetuated very accurately. OR, that both came up with the same quote. OR, that one of them stole it from the other. OR, that both were quoting an earlier source.
Of course, it could just be a coincidence.
Posted
by D. Weinberger at May 2, 2003 10:03 AM
Comments
This is in regards to the 'coincidence' quote, (I realise you posted this a long time ago but I'm researching it now for a film script).
It's a difficult one so I went with ages.
Einstein was born in 1879
Lessing was born in 1919
That mean's Einstien was 40 years old before lessing was even born. Now bearing in mind this is a fairly inspired quote we have to assume that one would be fairly wisened to come up with it. So we have to assume that Lessing is at least 25 when she said it.
At that time Einstein is 65. Now Einstein discovered his theory of realtivity in 1905 at the age of 26. Lessing isn't even born so it's not like Einstein suddenly became smart in his later days he was always that way.
So if we look at the facts we have to assume that Einstein, in the 60 years before Lessing made it to 25 years old, never once used the 'coincidence' quote and that Einstein copied it at the age of 60, with his intelliect, from a 25 year old writer.
so put it this way young naive 25 year old writer or 60 year old wisened genius who reshaped the worlds concept of physics and the way we look at the cosmos.
I know who gets my vote.
Just thought u might be interested.
Posted by: Alex | February 13, 2004 02:41 AM