What If You Kept Getting Luckier and Couldn't Stop?

The premise is made up. The physics behind it is real: why toast lands butter-side down, the odds of a perfect shuffle, the second law of thermodynamics as statistics, how a fridge dumps heat, quantum tunneling in your phone's memory and in the Sun, particles as clouds of probability, black hole entropy, and how small Earth would be as a black hole. CHAPTERS 0:00 Completely average 0:21 Day one: ×10 1:24 Things get strange 1:50 Impossible 2:43 The bill 3:32 The circle 4:23 Through the wall 5:02 Teleporting 5:52 Exiled 6:36 The math 7:24 2 centimeters SOURCES Matthews (1995), "Tumbling toast, Murphy's Law and the fundamental constants," European Journal of Physics 16(4): toast from table height usually lands butter-side down Checkout lines: with three lines, one of the other two is the fastest 2 times out of 3 Rock, paper, scissors: 3^40 = 12,157,665,459,056,928,801 (about 12 quintillion) Perfect shuffle: 52! ≈ 8.07 × 10^67 possible orders; Earth has about 1.3 × 10^50 atoms Wang, Sevick, Mittag, Searles & Evans (2002), "Experimental Demonstration of Violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics for Small Systems and Short Time Scales," Physical Review Letters 89, 050601 Lenzlinger & Snow (1969), "Fowler-Nordheim Tunneling into Thermally Grown SiO2," Journal of Applied Physics 40: the tunneling that flash memory uses to store data Gamow (1928): quantum tunneling through the Coulomb barrier, which lets protons fuse in the Sun's core (proton-proton chain) Bekenstein (1973), "Black Holes and Entropy," Physical Review D 7, 2333; Hawking (1975), "Particle creation by black holes," Communications in Mathematical Physics 43 Earth as a black hole: Schwarzschild radius 2GM/c² ≈ 8.9 mm (about 1.8 cm across); Earth's mass ≈ 5.97 × 10^24 kg, about 6 sextillion tonnes NASA: the International Space Station orbits Earth about every 90 minutes, about 16 sunrises a day The Moon's orbit depends only on Earth's mass, not its size #whatif #luck #physics