Coincidence, Mass Shootings, and Mourning
What are the chances that two entirely separate mass shootings are both perpetrated by graduate physics students who seemingly failed in the study of plasma? (I don’t have any understanding of plasma, despite my undergraduate degree in the sciences. Plasma was never on my radar, and I managed to get past my college physics course through sheer luck. Like so many other colleges, the University of Connecticut shut down in the spring of 1970 after Kent State.) I’m sure I’m not the only one who has connected the recent tragic shootings at Brown University and of an MIT physics professor to the terribly sad essay by Jo Ann Beard, i.e., “The Fourth State of Matter,” which recounts the mass shooing that took place at the University of Iowa on November 1, 1991. (If you have never read Beard’s essay, I encourage you to do so, and I frequently teach it in my classes at American University.)
But this connection is only in my mind, which sees what is purely and incontrovertibly a coincidence without further significance. There is no true connection between the study of plasma and one’s likelihood of perpetrating a mass shooting.
This leads me to speculate about the nature of coincidences. They are inevitable and the meat of conspiracy theories, but also necessary to explain life, i.e., that we are here speculating and trying to make connections. After all, had it not been for the coincidence of gases in interstellar space, the galaxies would never have formed, there would be no stars, and without stars and the elements they create, there would be no life. So, is the presence of life proof of a conspiracy? Or are coincidences inevitable, not requiring any causal or human connection?
We can believe whatever we want to believe. I choose to believe that coincidences are inevitable, not requiring any causal or human connection. That others may choose different answers is also inevitable. So let’s mourn these tragic deaths together as well as the deaths at the University of Iowa in 1991 and all those in between.