The significance of unlikely events

At a wedding reception recently, a cork from a bottle of champagne recoiled off the roof, hit the tip of my hors d'oeuvre fork and expertly flipped it into my glass of punch. Now try to achieve this by design; you probably will not get it right in a thousand attempts. Yet such unlikely events occur every day. Throw some paper clips together and try to get them to link. Yet out of every box a number of linked paperclips will appear. Discuss an acquaintance with someone and he or she suddenly appears, as if called.

Are such events significant? The answer is typically no, these are just random events of no significance. The cork had to hit somewhere, it just happened to be the fork. The paper clips just happened to be pushed in such a way that they linked. Your friend just happened to be close when you were discussing him - you are conveniently forgetting the instances where you discussed him and he did not appear.

Such unlikely and probably random events typically have no significance and lead to nothing, but then again sometimes they may. An unlikely event, recognized by you as significant, may become what Nassim Taleb call a black swan. He describes a black swan event as an outlier that carries extreme impact and is only retrospectively predictable. Talib's black swan is therefore not quite the same as the black swan from science, the discovery or event that falsifies a scientific theory and proves it wrong (Popper).