About a year ago, fellow Beacon columnist Andrew Gordon men­tioned in one of his columns ^[1] how other­wise rational, fact-based people can be a bit super­sti­tious. This defi­nitely struck a chord with me as a rational engineer who is a bit super­sti­tious.

Basically, I have tended for years to have little things that I do “for luck.” For instance, I tend not to immediately open important letters or emails, for example those containing blood test results. This is obviously not because I think that the letters or electrons will rearrange themselves from a bad to a good configuration if I wait to read them. But I still delay anyway, “for luck.” I remember doing this as far back as when I received my under­grad­uate acceptance letter from university; I didn’t open that for several hours.

Being diagnosed with multiple myeloma first made me less superstitious than before, but I ended up being at least as superstitious as I ever was.

I remember after first being diagnosed having the somewhat liberating thought, “You did all these things for luck and still ended up getting cancer!” The recognition that my superstitious actions didn’t actually achieve anything meant that, for quite a while, I dropped them entirely.

However, I then got into a prolonged treatment-free phase after my stem cell transplant. During this period, I was basically waiting for my multiple myeloma to resurface, and the superstitions slowly crept back.

Somehow things are better now because I am no longer waiting so much for the other shoe to drop. In this respect (and this respect only!), I prefer already being on therapy, rather than waiting to see if the next set of blood test results will mean that I will have to start it.

At least I am not alone in being somewhat superstitious. Earlier this month I was staying at a large modern hotel for a conference. When I examined the controls in the elevator, it turned out that the floor buttons went straight from 12 to 14 – what a strange oversight! My pleasure in my room not being on the 13th floor was short-lived, as it was on the “14th” ...

Superstitions also arise in the space business. For example, the first missions of the space shuttle (or "Space Transportation System") were simply numbered STS-1 through STS-9. However, after that, a complicated numbering system was introduced that related to launch site, fiscal year, etc. The 13th flight ended up being called STS-41G. Several astronauts have reported that this system came about as a result of a case of triskaidekaphobia (fear or avoidance of the number 13) at NASA headquarters. I’m not sure I really blame those managers, though, after their experiences with Apollo 13!

In a similar vein, the MMS spacecraft that I work on were launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida late on the evening of March 12th of last year. However, we do all of our timing based on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which put the launch early on Friday the 13th. I must say that I consequently made an exception for launch timing and always thought of it in local time, not GMT.

Another example of space superstition is the presence of a four-leaf clover on the logo for each SpaceX launch after the first three. The first three SpaceX launches ended in failure, the fourth succeeded. Since by coincidence the logo for the fourth launch included a four-leaf clover, one has been present in every logo since then. Of course, SpaceX has lost two rockets in the past couple years despite the clovers, but they have become a tradition by now, and so remain.

There is also the tradition at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, home of most of NASA’s planetary missions, of eating “lucky peanuts” in the control room during critical events. This tradition apparently dates to the Ranger 7 mission in July 1964. Ranger was a series of robotic missions that collected data for the Apollo landings by crashing into the Moon, transmitting back increasingly detailed TV pictures of the lunar surface as they did so. The final picture taken by the spacecraft was always a bit sad: half an image of craters, half static after the spacecraft disintegrated upon impact with the Moon.

It is hard to remember now how difficult it was back in the 1960s just to make a spacecraft crash into the Moon and send back data, but it was. In fact, the first six Rangers failed, sometimes missing the Moon entirely. Finally, Ranger 7 succeeded. By coincidence, engineers had been passing around peanuts in the control room during the critical lunar descent; it “worked” again for Rangers 8 and 9, and the tradition has stuck ever since.

Even though we don’t really believe that peanuts, or clovers, or waiting to open letters can actually affect how events turn out, I suppose that dealing with things where bad results can be so very bad (for instance, space missions or multiple myeloma) makes harmless little habits seem worth indulging in “for luck.”

It reminds me of a story (perhaps apocryphal) about the famous quantum physicist Niels Bohr. A visitor noticed that Bohr had a lucky horseshoe on the wall, and asked in surprise if so eminent a scientist could really believe in such a thing. Bohr is said to have replied: “Of course not, but I understand that it brings you luck whether you believe in it or not.”

I’m with Niels Bohr.