A Light in the Dark

share your birthday. You dream about someone you haven't thought about in years, and then get a call that they have passed away. Your partner asks you to pick up a specific shampoo brand from the store, and all of a sudden, you start seeing commercials for it everywhere. Odd little coincidences like this happen all the time. History is full of them, but when they appear out of the blue, it can feel downright uncanny. Take the story of ten

year old Laura Buxton. In June of two thousand and one, Laura was in Staffordshire, England, celebrating her grandparents' fiftieth wedding anniversary, and on a whim, Laura's grandfather suggested that they release one of the gold Milar balloons that were decorating the grounds. Laura would attach a note to the balloon with instructions to contact her. If they were lucky, someone would get in touch and they'd find out exactly how far their

balloon had gone. Well, that balloon traveled one hundred and forty miles south before landing in a hedge in the county of Wiltshire. A farmer found it and read the attached note, and then he headed next door. As chance would have it, this farmer was neighbors with an entirely different girl, also named Laura Buxton. He gave the balloon to the second Laura, who followed the instructions and got in touch with Laura number one. The girls and their parents were all amused by the odd turn of events

and agreed that they should meet in person. And that's when the coincidences really started to balloon. As it turned out, Laura one and Laura two didn't just share a name. They were both in the fifth grade and both had no siblings. They had the same build, same eye color, and similar hair color. They each owned three year old female labradors, rabbits, and guinea pigs. They even dressed the same. Reportedly, the Lauras arrived to their first meeting in nearly identical

ensembles of pink jumpers and blue jeans. In the year since their first meeting, the story of the Lauras and their balloon has proliferated online. Exactly what makes it so sticky is hard to pin down. On face value, It's the mundane story of a chance meeting between two girls with a lot in common, made a bit sweeter by the fact that they remained friends for years afterwards. On another level, though, the story taps into our sense of

the supernatural. Like all uncanny coincidences, it makes us feel that the universe isn't random but meaningful, that there's a logic governing everything, and we're connected to each other in ways we can't begin to fathom. After all, in a meaningless random universe, would the Lauras ever have found each other at all? The answer, according to some staticians, is actually yes. This is due to the law of truly large numbers, which states that with a large enough data set,

any highly implausible result is likely to be observed. In Layman's terms, it means that with enough people doing enough things in enough different places all over a long enough period of time, seemingly unlikely events become extremely likely, even inevitable. But the story of the two Lauras isn't just about probability, and we don't have to believe in fate or a supernatural universe to appreciate the story. The thing that truly makes it resonates isn't just how unlikely it was that

two girls met. It's the fact that they almost didn't. If not for that balloon, they could have lived their whole lives not knowing that the other Laura existed. They would have missed out on a unique, fun and memorable experience,

not to mention friendship. David Spiegelhalter, a risk researcher at the University of Cambridge, said that, and I quote, a coincidence itself is in the eye of the beholder, and by this he means that the significance of any given coincidence is born from the fact that someone was present to witness and draw meaning from it. If the first Laura hadn't released her balloon and the girls never met,

then they would have just been statistical anomalies. But because they found each other, having so much in common, became special and maybe there's a lesson here for us, because whether you believe in an intentional universe or a random one, the reality is sometimes we are connected to each other in surprising ways. But if we never step outside our comfort zone, if we don't set our balloons loose once in a while, then you or I will never know

how truly special we are. When we think of ancient Egypt, our minds go straight to the pyramids. These monuments of the ancient world are massive structures containing subterranean chambers, long windowless hallways, and winding corridors. You can imagine the builders, the priests, and anyone else who had access to these tombs would have needed some kind of light to get around, which is why it's strange that in many Egyptian tombs

there's a distinct lack of torches. There's also very little soot residue on the ceilings, which you would expect to find if torches had been used during the building process. So were the ancient Egyptians just groping around in the dark. Well, if you've ever seen the nineteen ninety nine film The

Mummy starring Brennan Fraser, then you know the answer. The Pharaohs used intricate systems of mirrors to bring the power of the sun into their tombs, bouncing the light from one shiny surface to the next until every chamber was illuminated. Except that's probably just a bit of Hollywood fantasy. In reality, Egyptian mirrors were much too crude for such a feat. But there's another possibility, and it seems even more fantastical.

The idea was sparked by a discovery in a temple dedicated to the goddess Hathor near the city of Dundera. In a remote corner of that temple, a series of hieroglyphic carvings depict a strange scene. A bulb shaped device is shown sprouting from the floor, with a socket at one end and a long cable extending from the other. The socket continues into a long tube rounded at one end with a curving snake at its center. A priest

stands nearby, aiming the device upwards. It sounds impossible, but if you see the carvings, they look an awful lot like modern electric lights, complete with a wire inside. The snake's body serves as the filament of the light bulb. But aside from looking similar to a light, there's not a lot of hard evidence to suggest that's actually what

the reliefs show. You would think that if the Egyptians had access to electric lighting, they probably would have left behind some wires or glass bulbs, but nothing like that has ever turned up. Instead, most Egyptologists believe that the Dendera reliefs don't show a device, but an Egyptian creation myth. They was said that at the beginning of time, reality was covered by a primordial sea. The first thing to emerge from these dark waters was a single lotus flower.

The flower then gave birth to the sun god autumn Ra, who went on to create the entire universe. In the official interpretation of the Dendera carvings, this socket is the lotus flower from that myth, while the snake inside that bulb shaped bubble is autumn Ra. It's less exciting than thinking the hieroglyphs show us an ancient flashlight, but more believable, and that means that we're still in the dark. Sorry pun intended when it comes to explaining how the Egyptians

actually lit their tombs. Ultimately, the truth was hiding in plain sights all along. While ancient Egyptian tombs are short on torches. They do have plenty of bulls. There's nothing special about them, which is why archaeologists overlooked them for so long. But a text by the Greek historian Herodotus reveals that the Egyptians use these bulls as a unique kind of torch by filling them with castor oil and salt.

The salt kept the oil from spilling and dropping the wick, and that's why the bulls didn't need a groove or a notch that you would typically see in a torch. The castor oil burns clean, which explains the missing soot case closed right well probably. However, fringe theorists still cling to the possibility that the Dendera reliefs our evidence of ancient Egyptian electricity, and in the nineteen eighties an engineer named Walter Garn created a working replica of the Dendera

light based on the carvings. When he turned it on, the glowing filament inside the bulb pulsed and writhed, coiling and uncoiling a lot like a serpent rising from the bud of a lotus. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities, subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me

Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.