The Law of Conservation of Coincidence: Where Superstition Meets Science

By Maxfield Douglas Lennox Dow


There’s a hidden law beneath the surface of Harry Potter—and once you learn to see it, you can’t unsee it.

It’s called the Law of Conservation of Coincidence, and it changes everything. It’s the single most important rule for interpreting J.K. Rowling’s world—and maybe even the real world.

The idea is simple: When coincidences start to overlap, they stop being coincidences. They start becoming clues.

What begins as a flicker of intuition—a gut feeling—quickly becomes something more. When a detail echoes across multiple domains—text, mythology, character design, real-world history—it starts forming a pattern. And once that pattern repeats, it stops being a hunch and starts behaving like a system.

Not a conspiracy. Not a reach. Not a headcanon. A working theory that yields results.

This is how humanity has always advanced: we notice the weird thing first, then figure out why we noticed it. The gut becomes a hunch. The hunch becomes a rule. And when that rule starts bearing fruit—we call it science.

That’s what this essay is about: the moment when coincidence evolves into meaning.  That’s the moment chaos starts to make sense. And in the world of Harry Potter, it’s the only way to see the full picture.

The Law of Flukic Convergence

Not all ideas are created equal. Some are flukes. Some are patterns. And some—when struck just right—resonate across the story like some ancient gong that hasn't been struck in a thousand years.

That resonance is what I call Flukic Convergence: when seemingly unrelated elements “accidentally” line up in ways too precise to ignore. This is how we quantify that instinctive phrase: “That’s way too specific to be a coincidence.”

It’s a feeling most of us have had while reading Harry Potter, watching a movie, or connecting real-life dots. The moment something aligns so precisely it feels deliberate—even if you can’t prove it yet. Flukic Convergence is the method that turns that feeling into a process. The more these overlaps stack, the more we trust them.

Think of it like Sudoku. In the Japanese number puzzle, you don’t guess a number. You confirm it by ruling out every other possibility. A number is only locked in when it aligns in three separate directions: row, column, and box.

That’s how Rowling hides her truth. Not in plain sight—but in the cross-section.
Her clues aren’t random—they’re elegantly redundant. Overlapping, self-reinforcing, and waiting for someone to notice.


Here’s how we put this theory into practice:

One Coincidence: Data Point

A single coincidence might be interesting, but it doesn’t mean anything yet. It’s not even a coincidence—it’s just an unlikely thing that happened once. Not useful yet. This is what I’d call a fluke; a flicker in the fog. Log it. But don’t lean on it.

Two Overlaps: Red Flag

Now we pause. Two separate structures—textual, symbolic, or historical—echoing the same signal? That’s not nothing. Stick a flag on it. The pattern might be trying to reveal itself. Now’s the time to start digging.

Three or More Overlaps: Graduated to Rule

Once three distinct signals converge—across time, theme, metaphor, real-world reference, or character—we begin treating it as a working rule. It’s no longer a fluke. It’s a candidate for deeper truth.

In developing this method, I’ve yet to encounter a triad of overlapped coincidences that didn’t unlock something meaningful. In fact, I believe Rowling intentionally structured the Harry Potter series around this very principle.

The lattice of coincidence isn’t a side effect of deep lore—it is the lore. Myth, symbol, and history are threaded into the story’s skeleton, then carefully disguised as set dressing. Flukic Convergence gives us the tools to decode it. When three data points align, we’re not just allowed to take them seriously—we’re being invited to.

Suddenly, the throwaway detail isn’t throwaway. The pun isn’t just a pun. Even the silence between facts becomes a signal. Because when Rowling hides something, she doesn’t bury it—she braids it. This approach transforms even Rowling’s most innocuous choices into potential signals, allowing us to detect not only plot mechanics, but the sleight-of-hand behind her deeper meanings.

The Fruit Test

A theory’s truth doesn’t come from how clever it sounds. Truth isn’t what convinces you. Truth is what produces results.

Once a convergence graduates to “rule” status, we apply one question: Does it bear fruit? A real pattern leads somewhere. It unlocks new insights. It explains inconsistencies. It makes future discoveries easier—not harder. It becomes a compass through the fog.

This is where the method proves its worth—because some of the rules I’ve uncovered were so absurd, even I didn’t believe them at first. I’ve written headlines that felt too far-fetched to be real—until I followed them. Until I watched the theory write its own thesis and keep going. And what came back wasn’t nonsense. It was rich, strange, undeniable fruit.

Fruit I found deep in the desert of absurdity, where no regular fan would dare tread.

And that’s the real power of this system: it gives you permission to trust the ridiculous just long enough to see if it reveals something real. It turns what looks like superstition into a testable method. It transforms a hunch into a hypothesis—and then lets the results speak.

Because here’s the thing: if you follow a theory into the wilderness, and it keeps turning up buried treasure? That’s not coincidence. That’s a hidden structure revealing itself.

This is the value of building rules from your own observations. You’re not chasing whims. You’re tracking signals. You’re mapping something real—something invisible to anyone who never dared to believe their own headline. You don’t follow a hunch because it’s safe. You follow it because it’s loud.

And in a poetically meta twist, no single rule has borne more fruit than the Law of Conservation of Coincidence itself.

Fishing for Red Herrings

The Law of Conservation of Coincidence isn’t just good at finding meaning—it’s even better at spotting misdirection.

Once you’ve built a personal index of working rules, you develop a kind of radar. You start to notice when something breaks the pattern. And in Rowling’s world, that break is rarely an accident. It’s not sloppy writing. It’s a trap.

Because Rowling doesn’t just hide answers in the story—she hides them in the exceptions. In the places where logic almost holds, but doesn’t. If these patterns were visible on the surface, the series would’ve been solved two decades ago. Instead, she seeded the text with red herrings: false leads, half-truths, and deliberate dead ends. Many of them are never resolved in canon. That’s by design.

These misdirections aren’t just narrative fog—they’re decoys, placed to keep readers debating on the internet for years while the real answers sit in plain sight, waiting for a Canadian madman clever (and handsome) enough to see the truth.

So what do you do when something contradicts a rule you’ve built? You don’t abandon the rule. You inspect the contradiction. And I mean really inspect it. I’ve seen how far Rowling will go to misdirect readers on purpose—even down to something as seemingly trivial as the days of the week—just to make the whole thing look like a mess of sloppy errors.

But I’d argue the opposite: it’s not just full of mistakes. It’s riddled with them.

The “mistakes” are often where the biggest revelations are buried—right in the tension between what should happen and what does. Rowling plays in that space constantly. And sometimes, the narrator is even in on the trick. The magic only reveals itself when you accept that some clues were meant to be missed—and that only a pattern-literate reader would catch what’s been slipped beneath the surface.

That’s what this method gives you. It doesn’t just help you read the story—it trains you to catch the sleight-of-hand. Because in a story built on deception, the most powerful reader is the one who can spot the lie without losing the thread. And that’s exactly the kind of reader Rowling was writing for all along.

Pattern Recognition and the Psychology of Perception

Before we close the case, let’s talk psychology. Because even the Law of Conservation of Coincidence benefits from a little scientific backup—and some grounding guardrails.

First up is apophenia: the human tendency to perceive patterns in randomness. It’s the reason we see faces in clouds, symbols in coffee grounds, or fate in a traffic jam. It’s a double-edged sword—apophenia fuels both insight and delusion. But in the context of this method, it’s not the enemy. It’s the engine. Because spotting a pattern is only the beginning. What matters is what we do next.

That’s where Bayesian thinking comes in. Named after the mathematician Thomas Bayes, it’s the principle of updating your beliefs based on new evidence—not scrapping everything or doubling down, but adjusting probabilities as more information rolls in. That’s exactly how the Flukic Convergence model works: we don’t jump to conclusions, we watch for third confirmations. We let the pattern build itself—and if it stalls out, we drop it. It’s not about believing every gut instinct. It’s about trusting the ones that evolve.

And then there’s cognitive load theory, which is all about mental bandwidth. The average human brain can only hold about four to seven meaningful elements in working memory at a time. Rowling, whether consciously or instinctively, writes right to that limit. Her best puzzles live just beyond it—too scattered to grasp all at once, but elegant once you externalize the pieces. That’s why this method works: it offloads the cognitive strain. Instead of trying to remember everything, we write it down, stack the overlaps, and let the logic take over.

Together, these three lenses give us a kind of superpower: apophenia makes the connections, Bayesian logic filters the noise, and cognitive offloading frees up the RAM. That’s what turns coincidence into compass. That’s what lets you see the deeper structure—without getting lost in the fog.

Conclusion: Coincidence as Compass

This isn’t just a theory for interpreting Harry Potter. It’s a theory for interpreting anything rich, layered, and mysteriously constructed. The Law of Conservation of Coincidence gives us a way to trust our instincts without falling into delusion. It’s where myth meets method. Where gut meets grid.

Because coincidence is a kind of currency. And how much it buys you depends entirely on what your brain is trained to notice. If you're not naturally superstitious, you might miss the overlaps. But if you are—if you've trained your attention like a diviner tuning a radio dial—you’ll start hearing the hum beneath the noise.

That’s when the signal comes through. That’s when chaos organizes itself into something legible. And when that happens? You’re no longer just decoding a story—you’re glimpsing the blueprint behind it.

But a word of caution: this method works differently in fiction than in real life. In a novel—especially one built on myth and riddle—the bar for Flukic Convergence is lower by design. Patterns are meant to be found. In the real world, we have to raise the standard. Coincidence still matters—but it takes far more to graduate a real-world theory into truth. That’s not a weakness of the method—it’s the proof it’s grounded.

Because when used responsibly, this framework doesn’t generate conspiracy. It generates clarity.

Once you learn to see overlapping coincidences as real—and test their fruit—you stop mistaking noise for nonsense. You start asking better questions. You begin decoding not just the plot, but the structure beneath it.

And when that happens? You’re not just reading the book. You’re reading the author. You’re seeing exactly how this story makes people feel things they don’t yet understand.