There is an old adage that we ‘make our own luck’. There is, in fact, plenty of scientific evidence to back this up.
Experiments have shown that ‘lucky’ people are less anxious, more intuitive and more resilient than those who regard themselves as ‘unlucky’.
Of course, this depends on what we mean by ‘good luck’ and ‘bad luck’. Some people can turn bad luck into good, while some people regard the slightest disappointment as terrible bad luck.
This can certainly make it seem that bad luck is not random.
However, modern quantum physics has shown us that, at least at the subatomic level, the Universe works with randomness at its core.
An ensemble of events can be accurately described statistically, but individual events can appear completely random.
For example, we can’t predict the radioactive decay of a single atom (it is random), but we can predict how long it will take for half the atoms in a sample to decay (the ‘half-life’).
Could this inherent randomness in the Universe mean that bad luck is also random?
We are constructed of material which, at the quantum level, appears to obey a kind of chaotic behaviour. Perhaps this behaviour scales up into our macro-world and removes cause-and-effect, making our luck unpredictable.
Many physicists have argued against this idea. In the quantum world, particles, for example, exist in simultaneous states of possibility and are made to choose one possibility over another by our interaction with them.
But ultimately, they are governed by rules which are probabilistic, and this also means they are fundamentally deterministic.
Randomness doesn’t actually exist, and so bad luck can’t be random in principle.
There is another more recent argument that quantum physics incorrectly assumes that all possibilities are possible. Although this makes the maths work, there is no good reason for this assumption.
Remove the assumption and what appears to be random actually isn’t. Again, this is a nail in the coffin for the idea that luck, good or bad, is random.
Perhaps the old adage remains the best way to view our trials and tribulations. We make our own fortune, or we don’t…
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Mark E. Graber, Houston) 'Is bad luck actually random?'
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