LYRICFLUENT
LYRICFLUENTThe Origin Of Countless Conspiracy Theories Lyrics by Addison Anderson Addison Anderson
Below, you will find the lyrics for The Origin Of Countless Conspiracy Theories by Addison Anderson.
If you line up the entire text of 'Moby Dick,'
Which was published in 1851
Into a giant rectangle
You may notice some peculiar patterns
Like these words
Which seem to predict the assassination of Martin Luther King
Or these references to the 1997 death of Princess Di
So, was Herman Melville a secret prophet?
The answer is no
And we know that thanks to a mathematical principle
Called Ramsey theory
It's the reason we can find geometric shapes in the night sky
It's why we can know without checking
That at least two people in London
Have exactly the same number of hairs on their head
And it explains why patterns can be found in just about any text
Even Vanilla Ice lyrics
So what is Ramsey theory?
Simply put, it states that given enough elements in a set or structure
Some particular interesting pattern among them
Is guaranteed to emerge
As a simple example, let's look at what's called the party problem
A classic illustration of Ramsey theory
Suppose there are at least six people at a party
Amazingly enough, we can say for sure
That some group of three of them either all know each other
Or have never met before
Without knowing a single thing about them
We can demonstrate that by graphing out all the possibilities
Each point represents a person
And a line indicates that the pair know each other
Every pair only has two possibilities: they either
Know each other or they don't
There are a lot of possibilities
But every single one has the property that we're looking for
Six is the lowest number of guests where that's
Guaranteed to be the case
Which we can express like this
Ramsey theory gives us a guarantee
That such a minimum number exists for certain patterns
But no easy way to find it
In this case, as the total number of guests grows higher
The combinations get out of control
For instance, say you're trying to find out the minimum size of a party
Where there's a group of five people who all know
Each other or all don't
Despite five being a small number
The answer is virtually impossible to discover
Through an exhaustive search like this
That's because of the sheer volume of possibilities
A party with 48 guests has 2^ possible configurations
More than the number of atoms in the Universe
Even with the help of computers
The best we know is that the answer to this question
Is somewhere between 43 and 49 guests
What this shows us is that specific patterns
With seemingly astronomical odds
Can emerge from a relatively small set
And with a very large set, the possibilities are almost endless
Any four stars where no three lie in a straight line
Will form some quadrilateral shape
Expand that to the thousands of stars we can see in the sky
And it's no surprise that we can find all sorts of familiar shapes
And even creatures if we look for them
So what are the chances of a text concealing a prophecy?
Well, when you factor in the number of letters
The variety of possible related words
And all their abbreviations and alternate spellings
They're pretty high
You can try it yourself
Just pick a favorite text
Arrange the letters in a grid
And see what you can find
The mathematician T.S. Motzkin once remarked that
'while disorder is more probable in general
Complete disorder is impossible.'
The sheer size of the Universe guarantees
That some of its random elements
Will fall into specific arrangements
And because we evolved to notice patterns
And pick out signals among the noise
We are often tempted to find intentional meaning
Where there may not be any
So while we may be awed by hidden messages
In everything from books
To pieces of toast
To the night sky
Their real origin is usually our own minds
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