The Coin Toss and the Love Triangle - Issue 44: Luck

"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all." Chance appears to name a single, unitary thing. But its genealogy, its family history, turns out to be a tangled one. One way to understand its branching origins is to turn to literature: We may look, in turn, to two very different novels. Anton Chigurh, the antagonist of Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men, forces his victims to guess the outcome of a coin toss, taking their life if they guess in error. That chance is entirely contained, not in Chigurh, but in the toss--in nature itself. This is one source of uncertainty.