Was It Fate, or Just Math? Famous Cases of Synchronicity
In 1972, actor Anthony Hopkins was preparing for a film adaptation of George Feifer’s The Girl from Petrovka. Unable to find a copy in London bookstores, he eventually found one sitting on a bench at Leicester Square Underground station. Two years later, Hopkins met Feifer and mentioned the strange discovery. Feifer told him that he had owned a copy of his own book filled with handwritten notes, but had lent it to a friend who subsequently lost it. Hopkins pulled out the copy he had found—and it turned out to be Feifer’s annotated copy. According to the account, Feifer later estimated the odds at roughly one in a hundred million, although that was his own informal estimate rather than a formal statistical calculation.
This kind of event is often called synchronicity, a concept developed by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung to describe meaningful coincidences that seem connected without an obvious causal relationship. For Jung, the significance wasn't simply that two unlikely things happened at the same time; it was that the coincidence carried personal meaning for the person experiencing it.
One of Jung’s most famous examples occurred during psychotherapy. A patient was telling him about a dream involving a golden scarab when Jung heard something tapping against the window. He opened it and found a beetle resembling a golden scarab, which he caught and handed to the patient. Jung believed the timing of the event helped break through the patient's resistance and became an important moment in the therapy.
Jung also recorded what he called his “day of the fishes.” On April 1, 1949, he encountered an unusual series of fish-related events: fish appeared at lunch, someone mentioned the traditional “April fish,” he came across an inscription involving fish, a former patient showed him paintings of fish, and another person showed him an embroidery containing a fish-like sea creature. The following morning, another patient told him a dream involving a large fish. Jung was already studying fish symbolism, so the cluster struck him as a meaningful coincidence.
But there is another way to look at extraordinary coincidences: math. When enough events happen to enough people, extremely unlikely combinations become inevitable somewhere. This is sometimes called the law of truly large numbers: given a sufficiently large number of opportunities, even events with tiny individual probabilities are likely to occur.
And yet, some coincidences are so oddly specific that probability doesn't quite capture the experience of being there.
Jung himself included a wonderfully strange example: the story of the French writer Émile Deschamps and a man named Monsieur de Fontgibu. As a boy, Deschamps was given a piece of plum pudding by Fontgibu. About ten years later, Deschamps encountered plum pudding at a Paris restaurant, only to discover that the last serving had already been ordered by Fontgibu. Many years later, while eating plum pudding at another dinner, Deschamps joked that the only thing missing was Fontgibu. At that exact moment, Fontgibu walked through the door—having accidentally gone to the wrong address. Jung included the story as an example of synchronicity.
Could something like this happen by chance? Of course. Given enough people, meals, acquaintances, and opportunities for coincidence, extraordinary combinations will eventually occur. But the mathematics doesn't explain why a particular coincidence can feel almost theatrical in the moment.
Maybe that's the real fascination of synchronicity. It doesn't require us to decide that fate has been proven—or that mathematics has failed. It simply leaves us with a more interesting question: when coincidence becomes meaningful, is the meaning something we create, something we discover, or something in between?
Sources: Carl Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle; International Association for Analytical Psychology; Diaconis & Mosteller, “Methods for Studying Coincidences”; documented accounts of Anthony Hopkins and George Feifer.
