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How many schemes may die
In one short afternoon
Entirely unknown
To those they most concern –
The man that was not lost
Because by accident
He varied by a ribbon’s width
From his accustomed route –

Emily Dickinson, poem 1150

Accident and chance play a gargantuan role in the world, far larger than we acknowledge.

The dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago because an asteroid 7.5 miles in diameter, in its random journey through space, hit the earth. Asteroids that size strike the earth only every 50 to 100 million years. How different would be all life on earth, including ours, if that asteroid had arrived 50 or 100 million years later.

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, by accident. Before leaving on a vacation, he carelessly left a petri dish of staphylococcus on a lab bench, in the open air, instead of enclosed in his incubator. When he returned to the lab, he was shocked by what he saw. Where there should have been opaque yellow clumps, the staph was clear as dew. Their cell walls had been burst open. Evidently, something had floated down from a window or the stairwell below, the spores of the penicillium mold, and destroyed the bacteria.

The Dead Sea scrolls, dating back 2000 years and considered one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all time, were found by accident. In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd was herding his flock in the hills of Qumran, near the northern end of the Dead Sea, when he wandered off to track down a stray. Along the way, he nearly fell into a deep vertical cave. According to reports, he dropped a stone down into the darkness and heard a pot shatter. He then returned to the spot with another shepherd, and the two men lowered themselves into the cave and retrieved several clay pots, containing the invaluable papyrus.

Accident. A word said or not said, an appointment cancelled or kept, a person met on the street or at a bar, even a single step to the right or the left can change the course of a life. The world rushes headlong towards us, yet at each moment it can branch this way or that, imperceptibly. A thousand accidents await us each day, most inconsequential, but not all. We are oblivious. We are dust motes, pushed this way and that by the invisible molecules of life.

I met my wife at university, where she was a graduate student and I a postdoctoral fellow. We met by chance in the “key punch room.” In those days, the instructions given to computers were embodied in cards, each about the size of a letter envelope. After figuring out what you wanted the computer to do, you typed the instructions on a special typewriter that punched holes in the cards, one line of code per card. You then placed the cards in a chute, which fed them to the computer. On each college campus, there was a room for doing all this. For months, I had been languishing in my attempts to meet members of the opposite sex. I had tried undergrad parties, bars, even knocking on the doors of unsuspecting female faculty members whose photos I’d perused in the university directory. One day I was in the card punch room, totally focused on punching my cards, the last place I would go to meet a young woman. My future wife happened to be there on the other side of the table, punching her own cards. What if she had stayed home that day to read a book? My daughters Elyse and Kara would not exist.

The odds at work, silently, silently, are staggering. Consider that each one of us originated with a single sperm cell merging with a single egg. In each menstrual cycle, one egg out of a thousand survives, and in each delivery of sperm, one out of 300 million reaches that one egg. If my arithmetic is right, that means that each one of us is 1 out of 300 billion human beings that could have been created by our parents. None of those other 299,999,999,999 human beings exist. But they might have.

And physicists have proposed that our entire universe is an accident, one of zillions of universes in the so-called “multiverse.” Actually, not quite zillions, but roughly 10⁵⁰⁰ as estimated by string theory. The vast majority of those universes would not have the right conditions for life to emerge – not only life like us but life of any kind. All the elements needed for life were forged in the nuclear fusion reactions in stars, and it turns out that you need special conditions in a universe to form stars (a narrow range for the strength of the nuclear force, a narrow range for the amount of dark energy, and so on). By definition, we happen to exist in one of the small fraction of universes with the right conditions for life. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here to discuss the situation.

Each one of us – including our universe as a whole – is a walking accident, a confluence of highly improbable events, large and small. Every day, a chain of accidents sends us one way or another, shapes us and changes us.

What are we to make of such ubiquitous serendipity, largely beyond our control?

I cannot begin to fathom the accident of our universe. But I can attempt to think about the accident of my own life. The first thought that comes to mind is humility. It is not by my merits that I exist, but by chance. It is not by my by merits that I was born with a healthy body and certain abilities, but by chance. It is not by my merits that I met the woman who is my wife, but by chance. Certainly, I would have found a mate sooner or later, and perhaps my merits might have played a role in that hypothetical situation, but the particular woman I met, and all the particulars following, were chance events. Undoubtedly, some of the success I’ve had in my life is not by my merits but by chance.

And what of other people? Realizing that chance has played a role in their lives as well, I should give them some slack. I should not be so judgmental of their particular situations. Aren’t we all flotsam and jetsam tossed about by the random currents of life? None of us follow straight lines of our choosing.

Then there is the meaning of chance for the deterministic rules of cause and effect. As a scientist, I am fully committed to the idea that every phenomenon has a physical cause, so that, in principle, every action could be reduced to something like “Atom A bumped into Atom B, which then bumped into Atom C . . . . ” But when random events are involved, or if the system is so incredibly complex that we cannot know where all the atoms are and how they are moving, then causality loses some of its usefulness. There were a vast number of atoms moving this way and that in my wife’s brain that made her decide to visit the key punch room that day long ago, and a much vaster number of atoms in the brains of all the other young women in the vicinity who might have gone to the key punch room that day. The role of chance in the world certainly does give some pause to the cozy notion of determinism.

If I could make some kind of “causal action map” that showed the decisions and activities of a person in a single 24-hour period, starting from the time they wake up in the morning until the time they go to sleep at night, and, as we move north on the page, indicating each successive point of the day where some new decision or action was taken and the various forces working on those actions, I would find the map quickly branching out into an infinite number of tiny threads, like looking at a coastline with a more and more powerful magnifying glass. (And I haven’t even mentioned quantum physics.)

I have on my bookshelf a worn copy of the I-Ching, an ancient Chinese classic of divination. The book uses 64 hexagrams to predict the future in various situations, both cosmological and personal. Even among the experts, the meaning of a given assembly of hexagrams is subject to different interpretations. If my understanding is correct, this book supports the philosophy that each event follows from a confluence of many different forces working simultaneously, some of them by chance, and that phenomena in the world cannot be reduced to “Atom A bumps Atom B and Atom B bumps Atom C . . . ” The I-Ching may have been written thousands of years ago to protect against randomness and chance, but it also seems to acknowledge and embrace those unpredictable forces.

In the end, the future is always uncertain. And contemplating the zillions of accidents that have brought me to this moment in time is too much for my limited brain. What I know is that I am here at this moment. I can feel the keyboard under my fingers. I can hear my breath moving out and moving in. I can see the shadow of the sun slowly sliding across the floor.