No matter what we think we know about odds-defying things, the truth is they do happen and they happen more often than we think. British statistician David J. Hand claims that even “extremely improbable events are commonplace.”

This is due to the improbability principle that’s comprised of five laws “analogous to the four laws of thermodynamics or Newton’s three laws of motion.” David insists that “These laws, the law of inevitability, the law of truly large numbers, the law of selection, the law of the probability lever, and the law of near enough, explain exactly why we should expect to encounter highly unlikely events, and indeed why we should expect to do so on a regular, even frequent, basis.”

This is where mathematics comes into play to define these principles and calculate what effect they have on each other. For example, the law of near enough “says that events that are sufficiently similar may be regarded as identical,” David explains.

In fact, this similarity is what precisely makes a dramatic difference. David adds the law of truly large numbers and the result is that “given enough opportunities, the probabilities of even very unlikely events can mount up to be almost certain.”

Those laws raise the number of opportunities for any unlikely happening to actually happen. Read more about David’s philosophy of probability in his book “The Improbability Principle.”