The Science of Luck

Image by nitrolxstock on deviantart.

It happens to all of us every now and then. Something good happens that we didn’t expect, or that is incredibly unlikely. We get a check in the mail. We win at a game we aren’t very skilled in. The rain lets up just as we have to go outside, despite a forecast of unrelenting downpour. Then, it happens again. And again. And we get a feeling of elation, as if something unseen is messing with the fabric of reality. Or, the opposite happens. We lose the game by a one-in-a-million chance occurrence. An apple falls in the mud, and the one drop it throws out lands on our nice white clothes. And these things start happening one after another, and we feel an otherworldly sense of despair, as if the universe itself were conspiring against us. In both instances, our minds search for an explanation, and we call it “luck.”

The gambling type like to link luck with feelings, going with their gut whether or not to make another bet or play another round. The rationalist type like to say luck doesn’t exist, that it’s just an illusion. Who is right? You’re probably expecting me to side with the rationalists, being one myself. But as much as I am a rationalist, I am also a non-conformist, and I choose a third option: to examine the idea of luck from a philosophical perspective.

In our last discussion, about God, we talked about open and closed definitions, and this seems a good time to put that concept to use. If we give luck a closed definition, it would say something like, “luck is an immaterial force that is sometimes aligned with your wellbeing and sometimes against it,” and the question would be whether or not it exists. On the other hand, if we give it an open definition, “luck is the explanation of why strings of unlikely things happen,” then we are describing something that definitely does exist, and the question becomes, “what is it?”

Instead of coming up with some hypothesis to test, let’s first see what we would expect based on known science and math. We’ll start with the simplest random system, flipping a coin. If it’s a well-balanced coin, it has a 50% chance of landing on heads and a 50% chance of landing on tails. So we expect if we flip it a bunch of times, we will get roughly half heads and half tails. If we were to flip 10 heads in a row, we would say that is sufficiently far from the expectation that it counts as luck.

What is the probability of flipping 10 heads in a row? Well, if each individual toss gives us a probability of 50%, or 1 in 2, or 1/2, then the probability of each subsequent head multiplies it by another 1/2. Let’s look at what we need to get a second head. The second head is also 1/2, but it only counts if we get the first head, making it 1/2 of 1/2, or 1/4. If we want a third head, it becomes 1/2 of 1/4, or 1/8. We see the pattern, the probability of getting n heads in a row is 1/2ⁿ. Thus, the probability of flippeing 10 heads in a row is 1/2¹⁰, or 1 in 1024.

But wait, we said it would count as luck if we flipped 10 heads in a row. But if we flip 10 coins 10,000 times, we’ll see 10 heads in a row a few times by sheer probability! In fact, if 10,000 people flip 10 heads once, we expect to find several of them have flipped 10 heads in a row, and for these individuals to get excited about it.

Now extend this to everyday experiences. If the probability of something happening to any given person at any given opportunity is 1 in a million, it’s not really that unlikely. There are billions of people in the world, and they may each have many opportunities a day for 1 in a million events to happen. Although the chance at any one time is very small, we should not be surprised when we see them happening all the time, and even to the same person in a row every now and then. No magic, no mysticism, we have found the explanation for luck in good old fashioned mathematics!

This tells us something else about luck; it is only an observation of the past, and cannot be used to predict the future. When we get “on a roll,” with lots of good things happening in a row, we feel like it is more likely for the next outcome to be a good one too. But unless there is some causal connection between past events and future events, the probability of the next good thing happening is the same regardless of what came before it. The probability you will roll a seven on a pair of fair dice is 1 in 6, regardless of whether this is your first throw, or you have already rolled eight sevens in a row. Your luck so far is not a good predictor for what will happen next. There is a chance, of course—1 in 6 is not that bad of odds—but there is no mystical force influencing the outcome in your favor.

When strings of unlikely things happen to us, we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s perfectly normal, just what we would expect in a universe governed by plain old natural statistics. Maybe you think that’s boring, and I’m taking all of the wonder out of luck. But I see it as the opposite: keeping the wonder of luck in a deterministic, mathematical world. The universe is stranger and more amazing than we can fathom, and the nature and logic behind the scenes doesn’t have to change any of that.

The God of Physics

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
–Werner Heisenberg, pioneer of quantum physics.

The Helix Nebula, an amazing piece of Creation 700 light years away.

God is a complicated topic. When most people think of God, they think of God the person, a superhero-like entity who has the power to will things into existence, and to exert control over things and people once they exist. They also imagine God as the epitome of knowledge, wisdom, and goodness, a living archetype of the perfect human being. But many would say God is more than this, that there is a facet of God these two descriptions don’t capture. This is the God we are going to talk about today, the God of the universe, woven throughout the fabric of nature.

To understand this conception of God, we go back to a discussion we had a year and a half ago about the natures of things. Everything that exists has a nature, a “way that it is.” This brings up a question: why are the natures of things what they are, instead of something else? Why does General Relativity describe the nature of gravity so well, whereas Modified Newtonian Dynamics, an alternative theory, does not? Why is the electron charge what it is, instead of some other value? As Stephen Hawking famously said, “What breathes fire into the equations?” There must be something, some transcendental principle of existence that differentiates between that which exists and that which does not. This principle is what physicists call God.

“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.”
–Albert Einstein

These are the equations of electromagnetism, the foundation which gives rise to light.

People have debated endlessly over whether God exists or not, most of the time getting nowhere. To help alleviate the frustration associated with this topic, I want to coin a couple of terms: open definition and closed definition. A closed definition is when you start with a clear conceptualization of something, and ask, “does it exist?” An open definition is when you start by observing something and giving it a name, and then ask, “what is it like?”

If we take God as described in a holy book, and say, “This is what God is like, and you either believe it or you don’t,” that is a closed-definition God. A closed-definition God is fair game to scientific investigation. It is often said, “You can’t put God in a test tube,” but in most cases that is not true. If God has the power to reshape nature by his will alone, then unless he is purposely trying to hide from us, we will be able to find signs of his meddling in nature; God’s fingerprints, so to speak. However, these are nowhere to be found. If we ask, “What would the universe be like if this God didn’t exist?” the answer is, “pretty much the same.” Nature goes along its merry mechanical course The weather is a result of currents and patterns and cycles in the atmosphere and ocean. Canyons are carved out by water eroding the rock away over centuries and millennia, which we can tell by examining the rock layers in the canyon walls. Life functions on biology, which is emergent from chemistry, which is in turn emergent from physics. Human societies function on psychology and tradition, shaped by our evolution and environments. Everything does what it does, moves the chain of cause and effect forward.

On the other hand, an open-definition God is another story entirely. If we look at the world and say, “Amazing! Why is it here?” and we call the answer “God,” whatever it is, then no one has grounds to say this God doesn’t exist. In fact, by its definition and the very existence of reality, this God must exist. However, we start out knowing nothing about this God. It is open for discovery and paradigm shifts and all of the things that breathe wonder into science and philosophy.

Through the early 20th century, it was fashionable for scientists and philosophers to talk about God. Today, it’s common for people in those fields to profess atheism, or at least disinterested agnosticism. This is because the emphasis of “God” has shifted back toward the personal aspect, and attention is being drawn to the negative social and political consequences of religious narratives. Sadly, much of the scholarly wonder at the mysteries of the universe has gone with it. Rare is the scientist who strives to discover the true interpretation of quantum physics, or the actual nature of physical reality.

This could change if more people realized God is not a package deal. God the person, God the archetype, and God the principle of existence are three separate concepts, and each may or may not exist independently of the others. If one does not see sufficient evidence supporting a personal God or and archetypal God, one can still believe in a universal God. For instance, I believe in the existence of God the archetype and God the principle of existence, but not God the person. I usually don’t call them God, but that’s just semantics.

“God is not He who is, but That which is.”
–Baruch Spinoza, Enlightenment philosopher

There are many great mysteries left in the universe, and sometimes adherence to religious narratives gets in the way of exploring them. But an uncompromising denial of religious narratives is sometimes no better. We need to realize that, whether you call it God or existence or fundamental reality, there is a transcendent wonder in striving to understand the mystery at the bottom of everything.