Resumen de Miracle on probability street.
The article provides views of skepticism about highly improbably events. I cannot always explain such specific incidents, but a principle of probability called the Law of Large Numbers shows that an event with a low probability of occurrence in a small number of trials has a high probability of occurrence in a large number of trials. Events with million-to-one odds happen 295 times a day in America. In their delightful book Debunked! CERN physicist Georges Charpak and University of Nice physicist Henri Broch show how the application of probability theory to such events is enlightening. In the case of death premonitions, suppose that you know of 10 people a year who die and that you think about each of those people once a year. One year contains 105,120 five minute intervals during which you might think about each of the 10 people, a probability of one out of 10,512 -- certainly an improbable event. With the well-known cognitive phenomenon of confirmation bias firmly in force, if just a couple of these people recount their miraculous tales in a public forum, the paranormal seems vindicated. In fact, they are merely demonstrating the laws of probability writ large.
