'Flipp'-50mm, f5.6, ISO 100, 1/200s. A Norwegian 20 kron coin.
Infinite number of coin tossing gives us a fair chance of head or tail catch, i.e. 50/50 chance. This is no-brainer; or is it? To your surprise, chance plays no role in coin tossing. What if you precisely identify and control all the physical factors affecting the launch, movement, and landing of the coin, to alter the probability of the results for your favor? Apparently, various robots have been developed for coin flipping with the accuracy close to 100%. We call it chance or randomness, because of our ignorance or lack of knowledge & control over the initial conditions. In coin tossing example, we don’t have that luxury to control the initial condition, therefore our results depend on the mercy of the luck.
We have landed a man on the moon; we have accurately predicted the eclipses for hundreds of years to come, but still we are unable to predict the direction of the wind, hours before blowing, if not minutes. Can a flap of a butterfly in Brazil cause a thunderstorm in Texas? The answer is yes. In a chaotic system, a tiny change in the initial condition may cause a dramatic difference in the end results. In weather forecast, this tiny change can be as small as a flap of a butterfly. The phenomenon which is called ‘Butterfly Effect’. What is grossly neglected is that a flap of butterfly in Brazil can prevent a thunderstorm in Texas too. A precise information about the existing condition, may enable us to predict the future precisely (or approximately). However, an approximate knowledge of the existing condition doesn’t enable us to predict the future approximately. Literally, it leaves us with an absolute randomness.
Human society seems to be a somewhat ordered system by information, regulations, rational bounding, and wisdom of crowd. But it is somewhat chaotic too as not only our decisions and actions are continually changing our paths of living, but also behavior of others impacts our lives. Where there is one job, and thousand applicants, if you get the job means the rest don’t get any. You start your day ten minutes later than you used to in the past ten years; most probable nothing unusual happens. What if you involve in a car accident? We are very much used to blame these tiny or major decisions in our lives to be responsible for unpleasant events. But in fact, you could also skip a car accident by starting your day slightly later than usual. No one knows how many times you skipped unpleasant situations by making odd, unusual, and usual decisions so far.
When it comes to the life, regression is a meaningless feeling. The life is a movie you can watch it only once. At the end of this movie, you may identify the spots that decisions and actions could be better or worse. In the middle of the movie, no one can foresee what future is going to bring for the artist. After so many years of studying and working as an accountant, you have lost your interest, and eventually, you are run-of-the-mill. Then you start speculation; you could go for your second interest after high school, pedagogy. Then you imagine the rest of your life path, as a successful person who is notable, satisfied, rich, and so forth. This is where I call it cheating. The reason I am calling it cheating is that you compare some parts of your rugged life which are seen with details, and features, with the parts you have not seen yet, and you predict, in that way, it could have been more promising. There is no guarantee that it could be better.
If regression is not the way of increasing our sense of responsibility towards the steps we take in our lives, what does it? The answer is being mindfulness. We ought to take the best decision in accordance to the best available existing data. In other words, we tend to make a robust information of initial condition. Then we yield to perform a decision-making process in accordance to the initial condition. If the outcome is in our favor, it is the result, otherwise, it’s a fresh data for the next analysis.
P.S. 23 photos have been shot from the flying coin to choose one satisfactory out of many.