I've had plenty of cups of coffee in my life (it's my principal addiction). I have never seen a cup of coffee jump two feet from my desk, nor has coffee spilled spontaneously on this on this manuscript without intervention (even in Russia). Indeed, it will take more than a mild coffee addiction to witness such an event; it would require more lifetimes than is perhaps conceivable - the odds are so small, one in so many zeros, that it would be impossible for me to write them down in my free time.

Yet the physical reality makes it possible for my cup to jump - very unlikely but possible. Particles jump around all the time. How come the coffee cup, itself composed of jumping particles, does not? The reason is simply, that for the cup to jump would require that all the particles jump in the same direction, and do so in lockstep several times in a row.

In the case of the marble statue, molecules in solid marble are continuously jostling against one another in random directions. The jostlings of the different molecules cancel one another out, so the whole hand of the statue stays still. But if, by sheer coincidence, all the molecules just happen to move in the same direction at the same moment, the hand would move. If they then all reversed direction at the same moment the hand would move back. In this way it is possible for the marble statue to wave at us. It could happen. The odds against such a coincidence is unimaginably great but they are not incalculably great. The number is so large that the entire age of the universe so far is too short a time to write out all the noughts!