The Magic of Reality Read Free Page A

and pots of glue to hold things together. Now suppose that, instead of reading the instructions and joining the parts in an orderly sequence, she just put all the bits into a great big bag and shook them up. What are the chances that the parts would happen to stick themselves together in just the right way to assemble a working coach? The answer is – effectively zero. And a part of the reason for that is the massive number of
possible
ways in which you could combine the shuffled bits and pieces which would not result in a working coach – or a working
anything
.
    If you take a load of parts and shake them around at random, they may just occasionally fall into a pattern that is useful, or that we otherwise recognize as somehow special. But the number of ways in which that can happen is tiny: very tiny indeed compared with the number of ways in which they will fall into a pattern that we don’t recognize as anything more than a heap of junk. There are millions of ways of shuffling and reshuffling a heap of bits and pieces: millions of ways of transforming them into … another heap of bits and pieces. Every time you shuffle them, you get a unique heap of junk that has never been seen before – but only a tiny minority of those millions of possible heaps will do anything useful (such as taking you to the ball) or will be remarkable or memorable in any way.
    Sometimes we can literally count the number of ways you can reshuffle a series of bits – as with a pack of cards, for instance, where the ‘bits’ are the individual cards.
    Suppose the dealer shuffles the pack and deals them out to four players, so that they each have 13 cards. I pick up my hand and gasp in astonishment. I have a complete hand of
13 spades
! All the spades.
    I am too startled to go on with the game, and I show my hand to the other three players, knowing they will be as amazed as I am.
    But then, one by one, each of the other players lays his cards on the table, and the gasps of astonishment grow with each hand. Every one of them has a ‘perfect’ hand: one has 13 hearts, another has 13 diamonds, and the last one has 13 clubs.
    Would this be supernatural magic? We might be tempted to think so. Mathematicians can calculate the chance of such a remarkable deal happening purely by chance. It turns out to be almost impossibly small: 1 in 53,644,737,765,488,792, 839,237,440,000. If you sat down and played cards for a trillion years, you might on one occasion get a perfect deal like that. But – and here’s the thing – this deal is no more unlikely than
every other deal of cards that has ever happened!
The chance of
any
particular deal of 52 cards is 1 in 53,644,737,765,488,792, 839,237,440,000 because that is the total number of all possible deals. It is just that we don’t notice any particular pattern in the vast majority of deals that are made, so they don’t strike us as anything out of the ordinary. We only notice the deals that happen to stand out in some way.
    There are billions of things you could turn a prince into, if you were brutal enough to rearrange his bits into billions of combinations at random. But most of those combinations would look like a mess – like all those billions of meaningless, random hands of cards that have been dealt. Only a tiny minority of those possible combinations of randomly shuffled prince-bits would be recognizable or good for anything at all, let alone a frog.
    Princes don’t turn into frogs, and pumpkins don’t turn into coaches, because frogs and coaches are complicated things whose bits could have been combined into an almost infinite number of heaps of junk. And yet we know, as a fact, that every living thing – every human, every crocodile, every blackbird, every tree and even every Brussels sprout – has evolved from other, originally simpler forms. So isn’t
that
just a process of luck, or a kind of magic? No! Absolutely not! This is a very common misunderstanding, so I want to explain right