Chance & evidence
How the tools measure a pattern against chance, and the claims of hidden structure they test — in the Bible, in Latin and Greek verse, in the First Folio, in gematria and in the sky at birth — each with what the tool finds and a link that opens it on the claim.
How a count is measured
- The number chance gives
- Where letters or events fall independently, a pattern turns up at each place as often as the product of its parts’ shares, so the expected count is the places times that product. A count well above it is worth a look; the chance of as many or more follows from a Poisson count.William F. and Elizebeth S. Friedman, The Cryptologist Looks at Shakespeare (1955), ch. VI
- The same data shuffled
- The fairer measure keeps everything but the order that is supposed to matter: a text’s letters, lines or chapters shuffled, a sample’s birth hours exchanged. Each control counts the same pattern again; the count stands as many standard deviations from them as it does, and the number of controls that reached it is said too.B. McKay, D. Bar-Natan, M. Bar-Hillel and G. Kalai, “Solving the Bible Code Puzzle”, Statistical Science 14 (2), 1999
- Looking everywhere
- A search that would have welcomed any word, any cipher or any name must be measured against all it might have found. So every word of a poem’s own vocabulary is counted down its lines, and every cipher and common word is tried against a number.Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller, “Methods for Studying Coincidences”, Journal of the American Statistical Association 84, 1989
- Free choices
- Spellings, which names, which skips, which sector division, which data to keep: each choice made after seeing the data widens the search without showing in the count. A test fixed beforehand, or run on data gathered by others, is the one that counts.Paul Kurtz, Jan Willem Nienhuys and Ranjit Sandhu, “Is the ‘Mars Effect’ Genuine?”, Journal of Scientific Exploration 11 (1), 1997
The claims
- The names of famous rabbis are encoded at equal skips in Genesis, near their dates, beyond what chance allows.As chance gives
- Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg, Statistical Science, 1994A word at every skip is common in so long a text. Moses (משה) in Genesis at skips 2–1000 stands 4 to 6 standard deviations above its letters shuffled but only 2 to 3½ above its chapters shuffled: letters gather in passages, which a letter shuffle undoes. McKay and colleagues traced the 1994 result to the choice of names and spellings.ELS Search: Moses in Genesis
- Virgil wrote MARS down the first letters of Aeneid 7.601–604, the lines on the gates of war.As chance gives
- Don Fowler, Classical Quarterly, 1983MARS runs down those lines and nowhere else in Virgil, but chance gives it about once in twenty readings of his 12,915 lines, and his line initials spell 196 words of his own vocabulary of four letters or more where chance gives 186. The count cannot make the case; only the passage can.Acrostic Search: MARS in Virgil
- Aratus set ΛΕΠΤΗ, “subtle”, down Phaenomena 783–787, beginning with the word itself.Beyond chance
- Jean-Marie Jacques, Revue des études anciennes, 1960Chance gives this five-letter word about once in 1,600 readings of the poem’s 1,154 lines, and the first of the five lines opens with λεπτή, so the word stands twice at one corner.Acrostic Search: ΛΕΠΤΗ in Aratus
- Psalm 119, Lamentations and other Hebrew poems run through the alphabet, verse by verse.Beyond chance
- The Masoretic text; Jewish Encyclopedia, “Acrostics”, 1901The rule finds seven runs through the whole alphabet in the Hebrew Bible — Psalms 34 and 119, Proverbs 31, Lamentations 1–4 — and in the Bible’s verses shuffled no run passes five letters.Acrostic Search: The alphabet in the Hebrew Bible
- Bacon signed the plays in acrostics read along a “string” of the lines — FRANCISCO BACONO in the Epilogue of The Tempest.As chance gives
- William Stone Booth, Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon, 1909Booth’s rules, run exactly, give his FRANCISCO and BACONO. Over the Folio’s 3,402 passages of 20 verse lines the same rules sign BACON 49 times and FRANCISCO 42 — and DONNE 86, NASHE 83, MARLOWE 80. The Friedmans found BEN JONSON in the same epilogue.Acrostic Search: FRANCISCO in the Epilogue
- The italic letters of the 1623 First Folio are set in two founts carrying Bacon’s cipher, which says that Bacon wrote the plays.Not borne out
- Elizabeth Wells Gallup, 1899–1916Her own a/b decode to her readings letter for letter: the decoding was never in doubt, the founts were. The Friedmans found her two forms too slight for anyone at Riverbank to sort as she did. Given a message James Phinney Baxter planted in the same poem in 1915, she read 51 of its 59 letters at first — after Baxter had misplaced some of his.Cipher Archive: Gallup’s First Folio cipher
- A name that adds up to 666 in a cipher marks its bearer.As chance gives
- A staple of gematria lists — KISSINGER in the cipher A = 6, B = 12 …KISSINGER does total 666 in that cipher. About one common word of nine letters in sixty totals 666 in at least one of the 33 ciphers, and 57 of the 3,305 commonest English words do, computer, business and ciphers among them.Gematria Nexus: Kissinger against 666
- Sports champions are born more often than others with Mars just past its rising or its culmination.Contested
- Michel Gauquelin, 1955 and afterHis 2,088 champions, recounted: 20.7% with Mars in sectors 1 and 4 (he published 21.65%), against about 17% when their own birth hours are exchanged at random — far beyond chance, and the Comité Para’s 535 agree. The tests gathered without him do not: the U.S. 408 give 13.5%, the CFEPP’s 1,120 18.5% against 17.7% in scrambles.Gauquelin Sectors: The Mars effect
- Writers are born more often than others with the Moon just past her rising or her culmination.Contested
- Michel Gauquelin, from the writers he printed in 1970His writers, recounted: 21.5% of 1,352 with the Moon in sectors 1 and 4, against about 16.5% when their own birth hours are exchanged at random — far beyond chance. Samples gathered since are too small to settle it: of Müller’s 402 Italians, 21.0% of the 200 also in Gauquelin’s volumes but 18.3% of the 202 new, within chance; Gauquelin’s own new French writers of 1984, the 175 that can be placed, give 20.6%.Gauquelin Sectors: The Moon at writers’ births