Get Lucky

So if there's one phrase uttered more than any other between the messes and ramblings of stressed university students during this period of reflection, it would have to be "good luck". Good luck remembering the dribble you somehow learnt thirteen weeks ago. Good luck proving to the university that you know things even if you can't prove yourself with an open book in front of your eyes. Good luck to all those who are in the progress of questioning life itself, when existence seems like 300 pages of readings that were expected weeks ago.

Good luck is one of those phrases that definitely stirs a lot of questions about determinism and entropy, all sorts of philosophical and physical inquiries, and it also makes you think about the last time you watched "good luck Chuck" or listened to Daft Punk's latest single. Luck is something that has always been an important part of my life, important so far as not really existing in many of the moments when i needed it. Needless to say that in many moments where a stack of chips in on a particular square in roulette, it never quite swings my way. Although every time i think i have some sort of illogical strategy regarding the numbers, i begin questioning the randomness of roulette. It is after all, a ball rolling on a spinning wheel, if you were able to calculate the velocity of the ball, the velocity of the wheel and accommodate most of the other forces: gravity, air friction and the wooden wheel friction; shouldn't it be possible to predict exactly where the ball will spin? Not sure if this is here say but some 21-style MIT-esque students tracked the ball using their phones and bet accordingly on the most likely areas the ball would land. The same goes for any casino game - there is this constant idea of luck although if you could track the dealer's hands or the machine's shuffling - you could theoretically predict exactly what hand you would get. So is there really "luck" or is everything governed my universal physical laws regarding motion?

From my naive understanding of quantum mechanics, luck is woven into the fabric of existence. On the everyday surface, things can be definite: if i chuck a ball, it's probably going to travel in a certain trajectory. However, when we start getting to the incredibly small, sub-particle scale, things are chaotic. Probability waves and random chance are behind the fundamentals of really small stuff - crazy phenomenon where objects really distant can influence each other, where two states of reality can exist together and separately. Essentially, luck so to speak is written in the small parts that make up our big world. However, it just seems that luck has no say because in the bigger world, randomness seems to have a small effect on the outcome and dice aren't just gong to teleport across the craps table and somehow end up in France.

We also utter the phrase "get lucky" when it refers to getting laid but isn't the success of such sexual encounters a mixture of alcohol, and well, copious amounts of such? At the end of the day, hormones, personality and physical appearances probably have a lot more to do with people getting lucky than luck itself. Again it really does make you think about how luck has to play with all aspects of life even social interaction. At the end of it all, the question really is will having luck save us all from our terrible examination performances. Probably not because study and hard work would have saved us, if we had done that over the semester. Instead we rely on quantum mechanics to somehow pull a miracle out of nowhere, and information to teleport from our unopened textbooks into our minds on the day of the exam. Nevertheless, it's still physically possible although nearly impossible. With that said, i wish all university students still with tests, good luck.

Luck didn't work for exams but screw it so bye.