How could there be  watertight scientific reason absolutely forbidding any gems - exept for one pearl, one ruby, and one diamond - from ever being found on the floor of the caspian sea? It sounds absurd.
This is typical of how we think about the physical world - we think of it as being filled with contingent events, facts that could be otherwise, situations that have no fundamental reason for their being as they are. But let me remind you that mathematicians see their pristine, abstract world as the antithesis to the random, accident-filled world we all inhabit. Things that happen in the mathematical world strike mathematicians as happening , without any exeptions for statable, understandable reasons. 


-Douglas Hofstadter , i am a strange loop