OCR Text |
Show 77 35309 n prr; 1 : Belief in It Has Driven Millions Insane, Has Cast Other Millions Into Poverty, Has Created Demons and Divinities ! SCIENCE Answers IT IS ALL ABSURD and Tells the Reason VVN HERE is no such thing "V as LUCK. You may Jf f"fflT W" prosper while the next C S man falls ; you may win Js BB 'cu successive bets In J A cars or dice' yu ay 3t5Va stake yur fortune on a j1- . "J wager that the first girl you meet on rounding a certain corner will be redheaded, and win y6t you haven't any "good luck," because there Is no such a thing! "Bet You a Million" Gates, who would wager a fortune on which of two drops would trickle the more rapidly down a window win-dow pane, or would risk a year's earnings on the number of persons In a hotel lobby In the next street, never had any luck. Neither Nei-ther did "Pittsburgh Phil," whose race wagers made him wealthy and famous ; nor the notorious Garcia, whom the croupiers at Monte Carlo would pay without looking at the number of his bet ! Professor A. G. Keller, writing in the Scientific Monthly, admits that trying to explain certain happenings, recurring through all the ages, has caused man to create mythical demons and deities and superstitions. Yet he states unequivocally that there is no luck element In life. The world, and the. whole universe, he declares the whole scope of infinity operates on LAW, and the manifestations of this immutable im-mutable law, witnessed dlsjointedly, are attributed by man to erratic chance or "luck." No man has ever been lucky. As a corollary co-rollary of this pronouncement, it may be stated that no man has ever experienced "ill luck." His business may fall, his wife may die, he may sustain injuries that will cripple him as long as he lives, yet In no sense is he "unlucky." For what has happened could not have failed to have happened under the unalterable sequence of causes and effects. ef-fects. When Brick Kills Man. Let us take, an instance where a man has been killed by a brick faling from the tenth floor of a building under construction. The accident happened at 9 :07 a. in. Had he passed a second sooner or later he would have escaped. Yet the train of events preceding pre-ceding that accident marched methodically and mercilessly to its consummation. The bricklayer was addicted (o liquor. Alcohol deadens the nerves and paralyzes the reflexes. re-flexes. His grasp was not secure. He let go of the brick. Responding to the universal univer-sal law of gravity, it felU The man had left his motor car at 9:05. The walk carried car-ried him past the new structure. He should have arrived punctually at 0 o'clock. But a tire had given out, necessitating a change. The five minutes' delay had worked to bring him at the precise spot where the brick must inevitably have fallen, nt the precise moment when it fell. Yet we have the wear of rubber, the action of gravity, grav-ity, the height of buildings, the effect of alcohol upon human nerves all working toward that apex of time and place which resulted in a fatal accident We say the man was unlucky ! Yet do we regard- any one of the several sev-eral phenomena as unexplainable? Not at ull ! We know that rubber is softer than gravel or pavement; that alcohol works bodily ruin ; that an object heavier than air must fall to earth, etc., through an endless chain of fact Yet arbitrarily, without logic or reason, we watch such a train of events lead to an unavoidable culmination, and call it "luck." And therein lies the whole fallacy of the "luck" hypothesis. Primitive man, says Professor Keller, made no attempt to reason out the causes of hapienlngs. Yet the Instinctive craving for something to which the untoward event might be attributed caused him to create out of fancy a vast and motley array of deities, demons, witches, spirits and mani-tous. mani-tous. Men supplicated and made offerings for safe sea voyages and preservation from wreck and disaster. Yet the conditions of Immunity from disaster were thosa of the age and strength of their sails and timbers, tim-bers, the atmospheric conditions caused by still other previous atmospheric condition that made for storms or calm, the existence exist-ence of uncharted reefs in or out of their . course, the purely automatic succession of fogs, rain, winds and sunshine that time evolves. If they made a safe voyage they accounted ac-counted themselves "lucky." Yet under the same array of conditions climatic, atmospheric at-mospheric and so on they would make that voyage a million or a billion times with invariably in-variably the same result. Luck was properly alluded to as a "fickle" goddess, because pure blundering man, blind to the inevitable relationship between cause and effect, sought from one set of conditions to attain an end that he had previously achieved, under an entirely different array of circumstances. A peculiar assumption is that "good luck" or beneficent happenings are normal, nor-mal, while unfavorable ones are abnormal, abnor-mal, and that while we are not prone to exult over an ordinary trend of events we loudly bewail any break in them that entails en-tails unpleasantness or suffering. Yet the one is as wholly natural as wholly in KILLED F' At 8:55 a.m. this man had tire trouble and was delayed five minutes while he repaired his machine. abeyance to the colossal law of interacting agencies as the other. "Perfect health," says Professor Keller, "is not normal, yet we go on the assumption that it is, and grumble at illness as a misfortune. mis-fortune. Age brings a series of discomforts discom-forts ; they are perfectly normal, but still we refuse to consider the good days as good fortune, and complain about the bad ones." Insurance Bar to "Luck." The civilized world is slowly and grudgingly grudg-ingly relinquishing the idea of "luck." Modern Mod-ern acceptance of adversity has caused human genius to Invent "Insurance," which wisely takes misfortune as unavoidable and contrives a scheme where the burden of loss may be so distributed over great numbers of society that no one is ruined by it A loss, for instance, of $10,000 in the burning of a building might very easily ruin the individual in-dividual owner. Yet an insurance organization organi-zation with thousands of members, can shoulder the loss without appreciable discomfort dis-comfort to the organization, and yet to the incalculable benefit of the individual loser. Yet, it is worth remarking, there has been a definite loss. It is a peculiar illusion of many that insurance, by some mysterious process, eliminates the element of loss in a disaster. As a matter of fact, all it does Is to spread the burden over greater numbers, num-bers, thus lightening the individual share. Insurance marks one of the most effective effec-tive steps to combat the adverse working of cause and effect that was formerly designated desig-nated 'luck." For assuredly much happens that man even with conscious knowledge cannot control. Thus the use of the term "acts of God" in certain laws and guaranty exemptions. exemp-tions. Floods, earthquakes, cyclones, famines fam-ines the Innumerable disasters that certain workings of the wind and waves and earth hold for man aro yet neither "lucky" nor "unlucky" In tho sonso that their occurrence is uncaused or onexplaiuublo. t -ami r: hi fPi K'--' thlVhX &"v 'V?ta 1 A "It is the rare working of the mathematical law of probability that keeps Monte Carlo crowded with fashionably dressed men and women," says Professor A. G. Keller. "It is coincidence that kept the suicide rate to six or seven a day." . (The painting "Monte Carlo" by Jose Beraud.) Man is gradually relinquishing one phase of the "luck" theory namely, that ill luck is abnormal. His fire, life and accident insurance in-surance schemes prove this. And one step away from the thralldom of helpless super-stitition super-stitition and abject abeyance to the "luck" theory is one step toward a more perfect civilization. . . BY At 9 a. m. he was riding toward his destination, when but for the tire he would have arrived. t Yet tell man that even In Ms carefully devised "games of chance" there is really no element of "luck" and you raise a storm of indignant and incredulous protest There Is no luck in the turning of cards or the clicking of dice. There is no "luck" In the act of purchasing a $2. lottery ticket that wins for you a fortune of 50,000 francs. Richard A. Proctor, an authority on such apparently diversified subjects as whist, astronomy and mathematics, after making the subject of "luck" and "chance" a matter of years of study, says that there is no "luck" whatsoever In the whole system. sys-tem. A man, he declares, may sit in a two-handed two-handed card game carried on between 00,000 couples aud win ten times in succession, succes-sion, and still not be "lucky." He proves it mathematically. "Let us suppose," be says, "a vast assemblage assem-blage say, 100,000 people playing at a game of chance. Let us have them divided into pairs, one of each pair to win, one to lose. Obviously, there will bo 25,000 so-called so-called lucky ones. But let them play a second sec-ond night. One-half must win. Of the 25,000 so-called lucky ones each stands one chance to win against one to lose. Approximately Approxi-mately 12,500 will win the second night The same equal probability of winning or losing obtaining the third evening, 6,250 will win of those who have already won twice. On the fourth night the number who persist in winning-Is 3,125, and so on down. Continuing in this manner for two weeks of play we still have five or six who have won persistently. Yet ngnlnst tho 00,0!)4 who have lost one or moro games theirs has been really no element of 'luck.' It is sheer, ' cold, unsentimental, unmystlcal mathe- i matics that accounts for the seeming uncan-niness uncan-niness of the" few individuals' alleged 'luck.'" Mathematicians have tabulated startling statistics of the probable recurrence of certain cer-tain combinations of numerals in the so-styled so-styled "games of chance." Ten race horses, ' each named and numbered, could run the staggering number of 3,628,800 races with- . out finishing in the same identical order twice ! ' . ' Steinmetz, the noted gambler, declares that in 1S13 a certain Mr. Ogden wagered 1,000 guineas to 1 that "7" could not be thrown ten times in succession with dice. LAW At 9:05 he left his car and a short walk carried him past a new building build-ing under construction. . The offer was accepted and the acceptor actually threw seven nine times. At this point Ogden, startled and astounded, offered to compromise the bet for 470 guineas. The offer was refused, and on the tenth throw the dice registered "0," thus saving the challenger's 1,000 guineas. Statistics of chance, taking into consideration consid-eration the possible combinations of the dice, reveals the fact that the odds against the success of the feat ure by cold computation compu-tation 00,4UG,175 to 1. Chance in Whist Play. 'f Lord Yorborough was foud of wagering 1,000 to 1 that a certain hand of whist-containing whist-containing no card above nine would not occur in the evening's play. Almost invariably in-variably the seemingly long odds found an acceptor. Yet It was a most unfair wager. Lord Yarhorough's actual chances of success suc-cess in winning his pound were almost 2,000.000 to 1. The success of, lotteries, gambling establishments, estab-lishments, roulette wheels, etc., us an Investment In-vestment for tho owners Is based solely on tho unfairness of tho odclB. "The houso wins," say tbo wise ones. And it does win. Tho odds offered aro oven or 1 to 2, or lu cuses 1,000 to 1 ostensibly. Actually they are -vastly more in favor of the establishment establish-ment they are trying to "buck." A 1,000,000,000 to 1 Chance. It is related by Proctor that Flamstead, the renowned astronomer of Greenwich Observatory, Ob-servatory, was approached by an old woman with a request that by his reading of the stars he tell her where her lost bundle of linen was. Flamstead, amused, at the old superstition, solemnly asked her to draw a rough map of the neighborhood of her home. She did, and with much mysterious process he made a cross on a certain point of it. "There," he said, "you will find your bun-1 die." He wanted her to return disillusioned, that he might explain to. her that astronomy was a science, not the astrology of quacks and charlatans. She returned profusely thankful. There, in a ditch at the exact point Flamstead had jokingly indicated, she had found her bundle. , Coincidence had accepted the challenge of n chance probably 1,000,000,000 to 1. It is coincidence that kept the suicide '.'not WW" I At S:07 a bricklayer whose nerves were upset by drink dropped a brick antJ ' rate up to six or seven a day at Monte Carlo. It is the rare working of the math-' math-' tmatienl law of probability that keeps tho fashionable gaming resorts of the world crowded with cultured, fashionably dressed men and women. Fortune has seemed to play peculiar favorites. Garcia, the notorious, handsome, immaculately im-maculately groomed, smiling, won so regularly regu-larly that the croupiers at Monte Carlo would push over their gold without troubling trou-bling to see where he had placed his bet When he entered the room play at tho other tables ceased. Kurope's wealthy aud wealth seekers. Its celebrities and social parasites, all crowded around to watch him play and Incidentally to make a handsome profit by placing their coin where lie placed his. Yut after a phenomenal run of "luck" ho, too, went tho. way of the nncaleulatlng mortal who doludes himself Into tho bullef that there is luck. Out of a vast cycle of possi- bijity he had just so many chances to win. And so-called chance saw fit to let him have j his winning numbers in a row. Jr Thousands of men have gone insane in endeavors to devise systems that will "break the bank" at Monte Carlo. They do not succeed. They would have to live a thousand years to run the gamut of combinations combi-nations that time and mathematics can " build out Of varied numbers. A gambler cannot devise an infallible system to win. He can, however, devise a system to break even. It is called the "martingale" "mar-tingale" or the "pyramid." If one loses a dollar he bets two. If he. lost a second time he wagers three the amount lost. He doubles and ' trebles until If his money holds out comes to the time when he may get out of the game with what he put in and nothing more. Remains Now in Games. There is no such thing as luck. The great' immutable fact of the universe uni-verse is unswerving, unchanging law. Man has begun to recognize this. As the centuries pass he is relegating his deities and demons of chance to oblivion. In a commercial way he anticipates all contingencies with insurance. But in his games and contests, in his wagers and lotteries he still trusts "luck." Cards will remain interesting. For -LUCK ' . il, V Pr , pi jf 4 It fell on the head of the "unfortunate" "unfortu-nate" man and killed him. Here we have the wear of rubber, the effect ef-fect of alcohol on the nervous system, sys-tem, the action of gravity, the height of buildings all working toward an spex of time and place. Yet we say the man who was killed was "unlucky." while there Is no "luck" in a game there is mathematical chance, psychology and telepathy. telep-athy. But "luck" the cnuselo,R, purposeless meaulnglefN thing an we have known It has reached tho end of Its fantastic career! Copyrljht, 1(17. by J. Kool.rJ |