Do you reckon there might be science behind feeling lucky?
Well, I do.
Back in my school days, whenever I sat for a test, I’d always make sure to bring the lucky pen with me.
A few people have told me they tend to wore a particular shirt on important occasions because they considered it to be lucky for them.
In India, people believe in something called ‘vaastu-shastra’, which prescribes a set of rules to keep in mind when designing homes or positioning furniture and fittings in order to bring good luck.
But what exactly is this phenomenon called luck? How do things become lucky or unlucky? Why do we feel fortunate on one day whereas hapless on another?
One afternoon, I was sitting idle when my mind decided to deep-dive into the ocean of philosophy and find “a pearl of an answer” to the question — how do you scientifically define the idea of “feeling lucky”?
After a considerable amount of thinking, I came up with a science-backed hypothesis that could provide a possible explanation for this phenomenon.
Now, whether the reasoning is logical, flawed, or thought-provoking — that’s completely up to you to decide.
Let's start with Matter
Our world is comprised of innumerable objects – from the almost invisible quarks to the giant planets and stars; each entity being a part of this giant cosmos.
Today, we have a fairly comprehensive understanding of these objects. A high-school student could explain in fair detail how these objects would interact with each other in real world.
But life wasn’t always like this.
Until a particular time in history, people believed that different objects are made up of different units, and that living and non-living things are completely different.
That is until one day, a Greek philosopher named Aristotle came up with the idea that anything which occupies space and has weight should be called ‘matter’.
Remarkably, he provided one blanket under which all objects of this universe could be placed, which was a turning point in history. You could say that the quest for unifying everything into a single entity started from that school of thought.
Later, the idea that matter was built of discrete building blocks, the so-called particulate theory of matter, was put forward by the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus.
Fast forward to the twentieth century, Albert Einstein showed that ultimately all matter could be converted to energy (known as mass-energy equivalence) and published the famous equation E equals mc squared, where E is the energy of mass m, times c the speed of light squared.
So effectively speaking, we could say that the Universe is composed of matter and energy. And since all matter is built-up with a condensed form of energy, the universe is composed of nothing but Energy, either stored or flowing in one form or the other.
So far, so good. But why am I telling you this? We’ll come to that. Bear with me for a moment.
When Matter started to Wave
Things were going just fine until one day someone proposed a remarkably revolutionary idea.
In his Ph.D. thesis in 1924, Louis de Broglie proposed the concept of “wave-particle duality” of matter: a theory which postulated that all particles exhibit both wave and particle nature.
This meant, that waves could exhibit particle-like properties while particles could exhibit wave-like properties. (More detailed explanation will follow soon).
At the time, this was a revolutionary concept although limited to the field of quantum mechanics.
But after the demonstration of wave-like properties in photons and electrons, experiments were conducted to show the wave-particle duality in larger particles: neutrons and protons.
In recent years, scientists have been able to conduct successful experiments with even larger particles – atoms and molecules – and claimed that these also act like waves.* [Check footnotes]
Okay, so scientific research has fairly established the fact that it is possible for larger objects to behave as waves. This seems reasonable to me because all large objects are ultimately composed of the same tiny particles, demonstrating wave-particle duality.
This way, it shouldn’t be too far-fetched to assume that the wave nature of a larger object is defined by a consolidated effect of all the smaller particles.
With me still? Good.
The Hypothesis
Following what we concluded in the previous section, let us assume for a moment that inanimate objects like a pen, shirt, or a table, and even living organisms such as humans, could one day be proven to have a potentially explainable wave as well as particle nature.
Let’s just assume.
Now, all waves in this universe have a fundamental property — Interference.
What is Interference? It’s pretty simple and easy to understand.
When two or more waves overlap at any given point in time and space, the final result is the superposition of one wave over the other. Simply put, they can either fully add to each other, fully cross out each other, or result in a combination of both.
Mathematically speaking, the calculation for the final result of interference between any two waves is actually pretty straightforward. However, the complexity of the calculation depends on how complicated the wave equation itself is.
Now, consider any point P(x, y, z, t) in the space-time continuum. Because we started with an assumption that all particles can have wave-like properties, we can imagine that at any such point P, a continuous interference of waves emanating from each particle in the universe would be taking place.
Okay, so what?
Now let’s look at the universe as three discrete but inter-dependent systems:
1. You
2. An object that you feel is lucky for you, like a pen or a shirt, and
3. The rest of this universe.
So you wear your shirt and sit for an exam; you’re feeling lucky and quite confident. You have your utmost focus and concentration, and eventually, your exam goes quite well! As a result, you stick to the same shirt for the rest of the exams (hopefully washing it in between).
But somehow, let’s say one of the tests doesn’t go very well, even after wearing that same lucky shirt.
Assuming you prepared equally for all the tests, how did that happen?
Your mind tries to figure out that probably there was something else that day that proved to be unlucky for you.
Ah, the human brain, constantly forming patterns out of random events.
Only this time, it might actually be right.
This is my hypothesis:
When you sit for a test with your lucky shirt on, you along with your shirt and the rest of the universe interfere constructively to produce a positive response, just like two sine waves with the same phase interfere to produce a resultant wave of greater positive amplitude.
Recall that initial random point P in the universe where we said interference is constantly taking place. Let us assume that this point is located specifically in the part of your brain responsible for making decisions (i.e., somewhere in the frontal lobe).
So the hypothesis is that a consolidated effect of the interference from all the waves in the universe, with all the relevant cells of your brain, could create a state of mind where you tend to make decisions that could be directly related to better chances of success, aka feeling lucky.
On the other hand, waves from the same universe could also change in a way that leads to destructive interference, making you not feel lucky even with all that preparation that you did.
Aha! So that’s what happened!
Following along the same lines, it could also explain how one day you wake up, and you’re filled with energy. Everything around you seems fresh and beautiful and lively.
On another day, you’re lethargic, and everything seems to be going wrong.
It’s all about how your brain perceives things and what decisions it takes based on the stimuli. And that perception is not independent of the universe — or, to be more specific — the waves from the universe.
Ah, so that's what it is!
My hypothesis is based on an assumption that feeling lucky is not a random phenomenon. It is the result of a combined effect from the entire universe, with a few objects probably playing a greater role than others.
Nevertheless, there is of course a possibility that I missed out on an important technical detail or made an assumption that cannot be validated.
But with the research on String theory gaining strong momentum, I believe there is a possibility that the wave nature of large objects could be explained in the future, along with the hypothesis that the behavior of one particle is affected by every other particle in the universe.
For those who are unaware, String theory considers the whole universe to be constituted of single, same type of units, called ‘strings’. These strings are in themselves, composed solely of energy. The different types of vibrations of these clusters of strings result in different kinds of materials.
If that is true, then it would mean that we are composed of nothing but billions of trillions of strings — and thus waves — and are bound to interfere in one way or another!
Whatever the case be, it was a pleasure to spend an afternoon thinking about this problem.
Do you think, maybe sometime in this century, we might actually have a wave equation for good luck?
Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below.
*(Recently Couder, Fort, et al. showed that we can use macroscopic oil droplets on a vibrating surface as a model of wave-particle duality—localized droplet creates periodical waves around and interaction with them leads to quantum-like phenomena)
For a quick understanding of String Theory, watch the following 2-minute video.
