ARTICLE

ThreeSkeptics Are Rightly Skeptical of Numerology,but There May Be Something Special About the Number 3BY SCOT iVlORRiS

IN LIGHT OF THE RECENT COVERAGE IN SKEPTIC

about the number 19—some of it serious, somelighthearted—I would like to stand up for the num-ber three. I think that a case can be made that threeis the most psychologically significant of all numbers—that our brains pay far more attention to threesthan to twos or fours or any other numbers, and thatthis may indeed be a unique sign of our humanity.

We find threes edl around us. We live in three-dimensional space, we see light that is composed ofthree primary colors, with the corresponding threetypes of cones in our retinas, and we describe colorsalong three dimensions—hue, saturation, andbrightness.

We have traditionally divided nature into threekingdoms—Einimal, vegetable, and mineral; all matterinto three states—solid, liquid, and gas; all composedof atoms having three constituents: protons, neu-trons, and electrons. Newton gave us three laws ofmotion and Maxwell three laws of thermodynamics.

In religion, there are the Three Jewels of Bud-dhism, the Three Pure Ones of Taoism, and Hindu'sBrahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Christianity has theHoly Trinity, the Holy Family (Jesus, Mary, andJoseph), the three Wise Men, and the three theolog-ical virtues—faith, hope, and charity.

In the nursery we hear about Goldilocks andthe Three Bears, the Three Blind Mice, the ThreeLittle Pigs; Huey, Dewey and Louie; Winkin',Blinkin', and Nod; and Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail. Later, we encounter the Three Musketeers, theThree Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges; Tom, Dick,and Harry; and the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Threes abound in the rhythm of our iconogra-phy: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; Leg-islative, Executive, and Judicial; A government ofthe people, by the people, and for the people; Thetruth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth;Faith, hope and cheirity; Blood, sweat and tears;Cold, silver, and bronze; I came, I saw, I conquered;Lies, damn lies, and statistics; Subject, predicate,object; Liberté, égalité, fraternité; Rock, paper, scis-

sors; Win, lose, or draw; Win, place, and show; Lock,stock, and barrel; Location, location, location.

John Atherton once v/rote a love poem abouthis favorite number:

THREES

I think that I shall never cA # ¡oveiier than 3;

For 3 < 6 or 4,And than 1 it's sli^tly >.

Ail things in nature come in 3s,Like . ' . 's, trios, Q.E.T).s;

While $s gain more dignityIf augmented 3 x 3—

A 3 whose slender curves are pressedBy banks, for compound interest;

Oh, would that, paying loans or rent.My rates were only 3%!

3^ expands with rapture freeAnd reaches toward 00

3 complements each x and y.And intimately lives with Jt.

A O's # of °Are best -r up by 3s,

But wrapped in dim obscurityIs the V-3.

Atoms are split by men like me.But only God is 1 in 3.

The human brain, I believe, is wired to pay spe-cial attention to threes. A single event stands alone.A second event of the same sort may suggest a pat-tern. If no third event occurs, we consider the firsttwo as probably coincidental, and we ignore them.But if a third instance does occur, we infer a plan,an "intelligence":

BAMl —"What was that?"BAM! ... BAM! —"Is the wind naaking a tree branchhit the roof?"BAML. .BAM!.. .BAM! —"Oh. Someone's at the door."

10 SKEPTIC MAGAZINE volume 17 number 2 2012

Numerology is a pseudoscience; no thoughtfulreader of Skeptic doubts that. It can be amusing toposit that seven is lucky, that 13 is unlucky, that 666is "the number of the beast" or that the overarchinganswer to everything is 42. But in reality there areno lucky or unlucky numbers, and there is no cos-mic universal significance tothe number three. But there is,I will argue, a human link tothree. Let me examine this linkby attending to several types ofexamples: visual, auditory, col-lections, luck, signals, and the"rule of three."

Visuai ThreesThe stars in the night sky aredistributed randomly from ourpoint of view, but one set ofthree stands out to everyoneworldwide—Orion's Belt. Thesethree stars are almost equallybright, almost equally spaced,and almost in a straight line.Straight lines do not oftenoccur in nature, so these threestars stand out like the sorethumb of a carpenter who setthem there—just so, accordingto a plan.

There are multitudes of"twos" in the sky—pairs ofstars equally bright a certaindistance apart, but none regis-ter on our consciousness ashaving any significance whatsoever. But Orion'sBelt demands our attention because if we didn'tknow better we might think this pattern was man-made.

Auditory ThreesI have already mentioned the three knocks at thedoor. The simplest rhythm requires three beats: thefirst two set up a pattern and the third establishesit. The third beat tells us we are listening to a %i6rhythm, and we infer a humsm intention behind it.

We count to three when we want to syn-chronize our actions with others: "On the count

• of three, everybody pull!; hip, hip, hooray!; goingonce, going twice, sold! The first two counts are

I necessary to establish the rate so that everyonecan predict when "three" will come based on the"one" and "two." Racers match their start times

with the familiar "Ready, Set, GO!"Think of the international distress signal S-O-S.

It doesn't stand for "Save Our Ship" or "Save OurSouls," or anything of the kind. It is just the MorseCode sequence for those letters: three dots, threedashes, and three dots. This triplet of threes is sim-

ply the fastest possible way tosay, "I am human; the sourceof this signal is intelligent; Ineed help."

Think of it: anythingshorter could be a nonrandommechanical event: three dotscould come from a machinethat clicks three times inevery cycle; three dots fol-lowed by three dashes couldbe a complex mechanicalcycle, or the dashes could be"echoes" of the first threedots. But if then there is athird set of three dots, not thistime followed by three dashes,the suspicion is confirmed—this signal has a humansource. The absolutely essen-tial information has been con-veyed in the shortest possibletime.

Note how this sequence of"event-hypothesis-confirmation"mirrors in some ways the basisof the scientific method. Thusare research grant proposalsbom.

CollectionsSome years ago, when I wrote the "Games" columnin OMNI magazine, a friend gave me a curious ob-ject—a small glass bottle with a wooden dowelthrough the neck, and a wood-screw that passedhorizontally through the dowel, inside the bottle. Iconsidered it a challenging "nonverbal puzzle"—astrange object just sitting there, defying one to ex-plain how it was created. I had a bottle of pearbrandy with a full-grown pear inside that raisedsimilar questions. I saw only a casual connectionbetween the dowel-and-screw bottle and the pear-brandy bottle until someone gave me a bottle with aRubik's cube inside. Now I had three objects of aclass: I had an Impossible Bottle Collection. One be-comes a genuine "collector of Xs" only when onegets a third "X".

volume 17 number 2 2012 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 1 1

Superstitions"Bad luck comes in threes," the saying goes; and it's true. Badluck does come in threes. It also comes in ones, twos, fours,and twelves. But note that it is when the third case of badluck occurs that we begin to take notice and consider thatthe events are linked. Two bad luck events are bad enough,and make us wonder if cruel fate has singled us out. Butthree? "Hey, something's going on here. This is more thanmere coincidence."

Note that the interval between bad luck events #2 and#3 doesn't have to match the same interval as between #1and #2. By this reasoning (or lack of reasoning really), wecome to the conclusion that a great many notable eventscome in threes—airplane crashes, celebrity deaths, birth an-nouncements, weddings. This comes from the tendency tolet the third event in a triplet define the period that consti-tutes "happening together." If there are three celebritydeaths in one week, the period is one week. If the thirddeath doesn't occur until a month later, then the acceptableperiod is one month. If this window of opportunity is suffi-ciently flexible, the belief that Things Happen in Threes canonly he confirmed.

There is another superstition that it is bad luck to be thethird person to light a cigarette off the same match. The su-perstition is said to have started among soldiers in thetrenches of the First World War when a sniper might see thefirst light, take aim on the second amd fire on the third.

Consider the "Rule of Three"In clear writing, sentences seem to demand a three-step ca-dence: just look all of my examples in the third, fourth,fifth, and sixth paragraphs of this article.

The rule of three is legendary in comedy. Jokes justseem to work better when they have three elements. On adesert island there's the Englishman, the Irishman and theScotsman; on a golf course it's a minister, a priest, and arabbi. The generic daily comic strip has three panels. Come-dian Paul Rodriguez put it this way: "It's the holy trinity ofcomedy. It doesn't work with two, and four is too many. Youneed three." Three is the smallest number of elements thatcan both establish and then violate a pattern. A joke is setup, the setup is reinforced, and the punch line breaks thepattern causing surprise and laughter.

Magicians, too, often perform their miracles on a countof three. The hand opens and the coin is there, the handopens again and the coin is still there. But on the thirdmove—presto—the coin is gone! In both comedy and magicthe pattern is the same—give two examples to set the pat-tern and a third case to break it, resulting in surprise and alaugh or a sense of wonder.

No other animal is surprised or fooled by the unex-pected change of the "third event." No other animal sees apattern in Orion's belt. And although every society has musi-cal rhythms—from a pounding African drum beat to a rous-ing Sousa march to—(insert third example here)—there isno other animal that hears a rhythm and, without training,sways to the beat as people everywhere do.

It is my thesis that the tendency to invest importance inthrees is a peculiarly human trait. It is at the basis of ourthinking—the compulsion to look for patterns and connec-tions, and to recognize when those patterns are fulfilled orbroken. It is the basis of how we identify true, intelligenthuman communication and separate it out from the cacoph-ony of stimuli all around us. B

37—Kreskin's Number

Another favorite nunnber of nriine besides the number 3 is 37. I caii it Kreskin's Nunnber because thennagician Kresl<in used to perfornn the following trick. In preparation for his stage magic act, the men-taiist says, "To see if this audience is receptive, i am going to try to transmit a number."

He holds his arm outstretched, palm toward the crowd, "it's a two-digit number between 1 and 50.Both digits are odd—like 17 or 31, but they are not the same, like 33."

Brow furrowed, hand-to forehead. Pause... "I was thinking of 37. How many of you got that? First ithought of 19 but then i switched. How many of you received my number?"

Usually about 40-50% of the hands go up.Psychic? No. Psychological? Yes.First, by saying it is a two-digit number he has reduced possible numbers from 50 to 40. By saying

both digits are odd, but not alike, he has reduced the remainder to only 8, and by slyly mentioning (andeliminating) 17, 31, and 19, he has brought the possibilities down to 5: (13, 15, 35, 37, 39).

People want to pick a "hidden" number that doesn't stand out. The superstitious 13 is too wellknown, and 15, 35 and 39 are conspicuous non-primes, easily divisible.

What's left? 37. It's a prime and just "feels random."

12 SKEPTIC MAGAZINE volume 17 number 2 2012

Copyright of Skeptic is the property of Skeptics Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to

multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users

may print, download, or email articles for individual use.