IKER JIMÉNEZ - Madrid, España
When the chance rises on itself, when the chance plays with its limits and the coincidences are intertwined in an astonishing and inexplicable way, the phenomena of Serendipia and Sincronicidad appear, two strange terms and "damned" that begin to interest to the own Science.
To know them is an exciting adventure and, in occasions, escalofriante. Does he dare?
A. B. is buying the bread in a quarter of the extrarradio that is something far from its house. It is very soon and you grieve there is traffic. Suddenly a couple appears of young, man and woman that push a car with great effort.
Nobody helps them and he decides to unite to them to bring closer the automobile to the sidewalk. When it is in full task, he notices how he is frozen the blood in the veins.
The registration of that old Talbot that they are mobilizing... it is that of their own car! The same numbers and letters of one much more modern and that at those hours it was placidly locked in the garage. The badges, for logic, have been steal before some few hours.
With steel temper the man doesn't move, it brings closer it in second line up to where they indicate him and then, discreetly, he enters in the bakery to call to the police containing his fear again.
Ten minutes later the explosives experts disable in the maletero a potent explosive that will be detonated that same morning. An impossible chance had avoided the tragedy.
Twenty years later, a night of July of 1999, it was sat down in front of the computer releyendo this history. The absolute still after the windows and the light of the flexo, delicate and indirect, created the favorable atmosphere to write.
On the table, in one of the first leaves of a notebook with hard tapas, it was written with red marker and for a lot a fact.
It was the key piece of an investigation that stopped to the force behind months. The first investigations had demonstrated me amply that it had not left for that name and too common last name. A pain.
They were those of a computer sevillano that it suffered inexplicable phenomena in 1988 and that he became, at least for me, in ilocalizable. He made a lot that he/she had already abandoned their hint.
At the 0.44 hours there was a blackout. the street Mysteries was in dimness. When restarting the computer, with the muses far already of my head, I intended to navigate for Internet to amuse a little.
Without knowing how - and this will understand it well the internet users - I was diving among a marasmus of pages dedicated to the Astronomy. Why Astronomy? Frankly, neither he/she devises. Neither it had proposed it to me neither there was any reason. I simply got entangled in that "cliqueando" the mouse in a weary way to visualize images of the NASA, of Mars, of Armstrong stepping the moon...
Among those more than fifty that I saw met with one that got me the attention for him well designed and their objectivity when exposing the last discoveries. A purely scientific page that never previously had seen.
Followed act, as a robot, I sent to that web an electronic mail to congratulate the anonymous author. It was something that I don't make habitually, given the few trusts that it inspires me the Net of nets.
The certain thing is that at the 0.59 hours a message blinked in the tray of entrance of my e-mail. Who did write me at those hours? I lowered the mailbox and I read with supreme attention: there the kind words of the author of the page appeared. "How quick! ', I thought.
In one of the lines there was something, among the courtesy and the good forms that I was surprised:
"It has been very curious. A true chance. Hardly some hours ago I have given of high the service of this page.
I have come me to live to Madrid from Seville. If you end up me to write only one day before we had never known each other! '.
I lowered the cursor and I met with the heading. The heart gave me an overturn.
I opened the notebook of wide open, and nervous field I nailed the eyes in the leaf and in the screen at the same time. I didn't know if to laugh or to shiver. It was him.
He avoids witness that had looked for during more than two years and that until that precise instant it seemed to have been swallowed by the selfsame Earth.
Question of probabilities
In the solitude of my own office it had happened an astonishing, too strange chance. And I can assure that the sensation with which stays the body is of the most disturbing thing.
It seemed a joke of "something" that had decided the moment to recapture that case "damned". Still dismayed I caught paper and pencil and I began to make numbers.
In that moment a million pages existed in the Net with some content it has more than enough Astronomy; so alone visited one of fifty o'clock that night he/she got my attention, approximately to one of each a hundred pages it is my habit to send a message, and only in one of each ten it is habitual that the anonymous author of the page decides to respond that same night putting his heading.
If this to that the servant has been reactivated exactly before one day rise and not other, the result is that the probability that the "I contact' he took place that night he/she rose at 1.82e+13.
Translated to the Christian: does one enter eighteen trillions (1/18.200.000.000.000). Pure chance?
For the British writer Horace Walpole, what my eyes had witnessed was not no more, no less that a complex serendipia process, word coined by him in 1754 after reading the work The Three princess of Serendip, an adventure located in a Persian Kingdom in the one that three main characters "they discovered for accident things that in that precise instant they were not looking for."
That strange easiness that apparently the oriental princes possessed he was crazy about and he investigated on her. And of those first studies, lain as it could not be otherwise of fortuitous discoveries, the term was born.
The most curious thing is that that place was not fictitious, like in an it began he/she thought. It existed physically. It was Sri Lanka (Island of Ceylon) and their name came from the old taken word of the Arab serendib.
Walpole never knew it who fought boldly to homologate that new word. Their fight was in vain while he lived, since he didn't go up to 1974 when the English academy accepted it definitively. It is curious, from that same moment, the serendipia has gone consolidating as term of scientific study and probabilístico.
For one decade it has been resuscitated as technical meaning by the noted Scientific American like reference to it is - tas coincidences difficultly explained and that they break the barriers of the casual thing.
Little by little, I lower those letters they have left crowding together exciting, tragic phenomena some and happy other that has not been more remedy than to accept given their firm truthfulness.
A fact of the social interest that comes off for these coincidences? does it demonstrate it the fact that recently Dry Manuel's noted dictionary - Spanish current - has it included the word, defining it as "ability to make a discovery or fortunate discovery in an accidental way."
Eureka!
The scream that Arquímedes pronounced means "I found it". That day, in the public bathrooms, maintained its head working to all rhythm in a headquarters of mathematical problems to solve. The body, therefore, well it deserved a rest.
Nobody knows exactly what an it happened, but that day the sage noticed with detail in how its anatomy, after a stumble, became lighter he/she conforms to it submerged and he/she made overflow the water on the outside.
A simple calculation demonstrated him that the process was it provides in each one of the immersions, and with imaginable racket their immortal born principle of the accident concluded... or of the serendipia.
Something similar and even more spectacular it happened in the rickety class of anatomy of Bologna, in Italy. He ran the year of 1786 and the professor Luigi Galvani diseccionaba carefully a frog to demonstrate their students one of their last advances in the art of the incision.
He had not put on the Sun when fortuitously an assistant not too attentive to the process it produced a spark when leaning on in an electrostatic machine.
The tip of the scalpel of Galvani made of driver and it passed the batrachian that, in the face of the fright of the present, it began to be convulsed violently.
The professor, impressed, tried to reproduce the experiment several times, putting in danger his own life, aware that something key for the human knowledge had just happened in that room. The students attended the act in complete silence. "When one of people played the nerves of the frog lightly with the scalpel - the doctor said in an official letter -, the muscles contracted again impelled by continuous cramps.'
In the small room, conceived for a class more than anatomy, he/she had just been discovered the "electric current". A new unexplored universe that in a principle Galvani baptized as "animal electricity.'
The paradigm change in the whole Science was radical, accidental. the nerves were no longer channels with fluids as it had sentenced you Discard, but electricity transmitters through the body. They had just sat down the bases of the neurology and the neurofisiología... and everything thanks to a dead frog and to a mysterious blow of chance.
Twenty-four years later, the same calambrazos suffered them Allessandro Volta when it experienced the theories of Galvani. An accident in which spilled out certain liquid on metal irons led to the incredible discovery of the electric pile.
Everything happened after a headquarters of accidents that, intertwined in oneself day, they took to the conclusion - accepted later on in the entire world - that the genesis of the electricity took place after the connection of two disparate metals through an electrolytic solution.
Practically identical the process of another substance that would change part of the consumption habits starting from the XIX century was. When the lunch, the workers of the laboratory Anger Remsen gave bill of its food in a near tavern.
A nicknamed scientific youth Fahiberg noticed a sweet flavor suddenly in the soup and it rebuked the rounded cook. Followed act checked that to the bread it happened him the same thing.
That was a disaster and to point leave angry. But he stopped in dry when discovering that their hand was spotted with a white substance.
It sucked it and at once it checked that it was the one that produced the pleasure. In the laboratory it was able to isolate the elements to know that a headquarters of complex reactions had arisen under its palm supported incorrectly in a table higienizada to originate the unknown element.
That day the laboratories took place for all the high one the discovery. That although they took months dedicated exclusively to the study of the extraction of coloring. By the way, the white powder was patented to the following ñana under the saccharin name.
Damned numbers
If the electronic mail, for mechanisms that neither they are written neither they know each other, it had coincided exactly in the time with another that the computer sevillano has remitted me - supposing that went fond of the mysteries that has read my articles and discovered my electronic mail suddenly in Internet in the same way that me his - and if the messages also have the same quantity of letters and, for example, identical hour of shipment, greeting and farewell, we would be before a true sincronicidad. An even more difficult mortal jump. Impossible? are there cases that demonstrate that nr.
Along the History there have been coincidences that you/they went a lot beyond what any imagination can elucubrar. In not few occasions the concrete numbers, the enigmatic world of the repetitive figures, he has left us some of these phenomena that are the limit of what we can consider chance.
An example is what happened to the writer of certain fame in the seventy, Judy Wax. In May of 1979, with the purpose of presenting their work Starting in the míddle, he took the flight 191 of American Airlines, an AD-10 full with take off in The Ángel and landing in Chicago. Very near this city the airplane smashed, dying all the passengers at once.
Surprisingly in the page 191 of that their last book commented its fear cerval to fly. Their readers were horrified by the coincidence, but stiller when they repaired that that same week the thick magazine Chicago, in the kiosks for one week, reproduced a last interview to the writer. A normal interview in all rule of not being for their location; the page 191.
In her a picture the last of the writer, frightened, the readers checked how if this put on to the trasluz, it was superimposed perfectly with an announcement of the following page. An announcement of the American Airlines announcing their flight 191 on board the comfortable one AD-10.
The phobia to some synchronous numbers should be allowed in cases like that of the tormented German composer Richard Wagner, to who tricadeicafobia should have been diagnosed in maximum grade (aversion to the number 13).
Their curious biography, analyzed point for point for the sagacious studious Gregorio Doval, shows us that the shade of that digit always pursued unfailingly him.
Wagner was born in 1813 - you calculate that of for yes they add 13 -, his name and last name had 13 letters, it felt his first musical impulse October 13, it suffered a 13 year-old exile harassed by their numerous creditors, it composed 13 operas, premiere a, the most celebrated, - Tanhauser - April 13.
In Paris - where it was presented March 13 1845 - it was censorship - he/she gives during fifty years, fair until their reinstatement May 13 1895. Their first performance took place in Riga (Latvia) in an inaugurated theater September 13, and great part of its existence passed it in Bayeuth, in an inaugurated inn August 13 and that he/she abandoned ruined September 13.
The also composer, besides father-in-law and protective, Franz Liszt, visited him for last time January of 1833, 13 observing in him a painful illness. A terrible ailment that, guess, it took it exactly away from the world of the alive ones one month later, when the old calendar showed the leaf of an unpleasant one February 13.
Name and names sincronía
There are people, anonymous most of them, as normal as anyone of us that have passed to the particular and almost unknown history of the sincronía for merits so own as difficultly you explained.
Chosen by the destination, for the luck or for the rawwest fatality, their greatness and miseries have become study object for the scarce investigators of these matters in those that the chance and the mystery in a single thing.
And it is that, let us be objective, it is difficult to qualify of merely accidental the Welsh commandant's history Joseph Surfolk, reached of full for a ray in the campaign of November of 1939.
Excluded of the trenches with paralysis in the inferior extremities was entered in a hospital of Wales where another ray that he left him an arm and the superior left half of the body without movement fell. In their gentle English retirement, in the garden next to their family, it was reached by other in the middle of day, without hardly storm rake.
It was 1948 and it was totally immobile. One year later a discharge coming from the sky penetrated in its bedroom and it crossed it from part to part killing him at once. The darkest thing is that it has more than enough the family vault, and only affecting to their niche, he/she threw another ray in 1960. Neither the gravediggers dared to come closer until the police arrived. Everybody knew their sad history.
And this case is not only. Other 'human lightning rod' it was the gamekeeper of Milwaukee Roy Charles Sullivan, reached seven times for the fury of the Nature.
The first time (1942) it only lost the fingernail of the fat finger of the foot. For fortune, Sullivan was more behind a step of the death.
Second third (1969 and 1970) it carbonized him the brows and the left shoulder. In 1972, a ray spark burned him later the whole hair and one year the right leg.
The penultimate stage of its calvary took place in 1976, when serious wounds opened up in chest and stomach soon after a new discharge that he was surprised in an interior patio. Finally it moved in 1983, but not for what all have imagined.
As the local newspaper prays you descerrajó a shot in the temple, unable to continue with that terrifying experience in which had become its life.
It is curious to check how, however, other they have escaped miraculously from the fauceses of the death for a similar process and, for fortune, happy in comparison with the two previously mentioned cases.
In this occasion the dice of an inexplicable chance wanted to bless to each other to a series of people without any relationship. How to explain the sinking of a ship otherwise December 15 1664 in the strait of Menay, in the coast of the north of Wales, catastrophe -82 dead passengers - of the one that only survived a called man Hugh Williams?
Is it maybe impossible not to relate it with the later naval accident of December 5 1785 that a balance of 60 drowned people and a survivor that Williams responded to the identity of Hugh hurtle?
And how not to spin him definitively in trilogy with the event picked up in the files police Scotsmen on the embarrancamiento and shipwreck August 5 1860 of a third ship with 26 passengers of those that only one survived whose name was... Hugh Williams!
But this is not everything. The history of the serendipia, of the parallel lives and of the extreme sincronías he still goes much further on. More far from what nobody can imagine.
