Seriality
The man who kept a ledger of coincidence
Seriality · 1919 · Vienna
Serie
He treated coincidence as something one could collect.
Paul Kammerer walked Vienna and wrote down repeats: a number, a name, a tram, a person twice in an afternoon. He classified them. In 1919 he published the collection and called the regularity a law of seriality. The cases are often small. That is the point. He was not hunting wonders. He was hunting series.
Sourced
The German book is the primary. Later English readers often meet him through Arthur Koestler. Koestler is a retelling, and a defense. Start with 1919 if you can.
Miss
His later scientific disgrace in another field is sometimes used to close this book without reading it. Read the ledger. Then read the controversy. They are not the same page.
A pattern needs a denominator. A ledger is already a selection.
Concordance
- The thing
- A Viennese biologist recording serial recurrences in ordinary life, then offering a theory of seriality.
- Seen
- Names, numbers, people, and situations repeating in short spans, written down.
- Sourced
- Paul Kammerer, Das Gesetz der Serie (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1919).
- Miss
- The ledger is selected by the collector. Misses are harder to keep.
- One question remains
- What happens to coincidence when it becomes data?
