While lecturing on probability at Warwick University one day in October 1972, Jeffrey Hamilton, demonstrating the effect of chance, took a coin from his pocket and casually tossed it in the air. The probability that the coin would land face up (heads) was exactly the same as the probability that it would land face down (tails); it was, Hamilton explained, a 50-50 proposition.
Hamilton and the assembled students then watched as it hit the floor, bounced, rolled, spun around -- and came to rest on its edge. After a stunned silence, the entire room broke into wild applause.
[In 1948, the mathematician Warren Weaver, writing in The Scientific Monthly, estimated the chance of a tossed coin landing on its edge to be approximately one in a billion.]
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