God does not throw dice.
-- Albert Einstein.
Years of being an engineer has turned me into a big disciple of science. As we all know, the ID "Albert Einstein" carries a lot of weight in science. If he says something, I will definitely chew on it for a long while, given the fact that he was able to come up with something as convoluted as the theory of relativity. (To be honest, I did poorly in Physics during my college year, although I once deemed myself having some talent on that subject. At long last, I found out that I am more of a craftsman than a master of science. That's how I ended up as an engineer :-)
I was also told by many that God works on a much bigger scale than you and I can ever imagine. Since God is the creator of every human being on earth, and since he created man after his own image, he must know every byte of them by heart. So any attempt by human being to outsmart God will be extremely difficult, if not impossible at all.
If Mr. Einstein is the Jesus in Physics, those words like karma, kismet, and destiny start to make sense. Despite many of us being the best planner on earth, life is still causatively capricious and fickle in large part. Tiny small things could easily change our life course in a second. You might have heard some nerdish scientists saying that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas. Although I'm not a butterfly, I do know that a small windfall could go a long way.
I was once an award winner in high school Physics contest. Yes, as I mentioned earlier, I once thought I was somehow gifted on that subject all because of this award-winning. That lucky shot lulled me into the illusion that I can be a scientist in Physics. Yes, can you imagine me being a scientist :-) Of course, Mr. Einstein may soon point out that Physics is not based on illusion. It has never been, and it will never be. In fact, that success indeed is a fluke. Before that contest, I have never advanced to any final round in similar contests. But the contest that I have the moment of Epiphany is the one that carries the most weight in high school years. With that single shot, I boosted my credit ranking dramatically in my high school.
And starting that year, the education system in the place I live was undergoing a reform. Some bureaucrats also had their moment of epiphany when they were drinking their afternoon teas in their air-conditioned office. If my memory serves well, the scientific facts at that time were that my home country has never had any indigenous Nobel laureates in nature science. (Regretfully, my home country still keeps the zero success-rate on that matter up to this point. But the good news is that this years' Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to ... the "You Know Who", which is beyond the scope of this article.). As you know, the government of my home country is very enthusiastic in any spectator sports, be it Olympic Games or World Cup. So the lack of grand standing success in science is no doubt an embarrassment at too many levels. They decided to pick some high school graduates to form elite classes in major universities, just like they pick some young folks to join the national soccer team, and focus their resources on those elite classes. The wishful thinking is that someone from such elite classes could one day win the Nobel Prize (presumably Physics when I was picked. Statistically if I'm lucky enough to hit an award at regional level, I should be able to hit a bigger one at higher level over a long period of time, right? :-). Anyway, due to my newly boosted credit ranking at my high school, I was admitted into one of such elite classes through the recommendation of my high school.
Being able to getting into such elite class did open my eyes widely. I met a lot of new folks who have fatty IQ scores. On top of that, they also showed huge interest in western literature, which make sense since English by itself must be more fascinating than the mind boggling Physics and Mathematics. Their fervor in English also influenced me as well. So the fluke in Physics competition somehow pushed me westward. And soon I found out that my IQ score is not in the same order as that of Mr. Einstein's. (I assume that is not a surprise to any of you, right:-) Engineering might be a closer match to my IQ score. Yes, I flunked on the way to Nobel Prize due to the constraint of my IQ score (Hope those fatty-score-folks could have better outcomes in that quest :-), but on the other hand, being able to get into an elite class did lend credit to my capability. And that was translated into a job offer after my graduation that brought me to the Mecca of tech world. When I was cracking Physics nuts on that day of contest, I'd never thought I would meet those wonderful folks in my life later, and work thousands miles away from my home town. Now come to think of it, perhaps God has something other than Physics for me to crack. God does work in a mysterious way.
But curiosity is human nature. Human Beings have never stopped their effort to fathom God's next move. In the theory of probability and random processes (Ref [1]), there is something called Markov Chain. Basically, it is a way to model the dependency among state transitions. If we take samples for observation, and if we observe long enough, we will notice that if a certain state with small transition probability does happen at some point over time, those states followed could become dramatically different afterwards. If we have to put out something mathematically to offer interpretation for karma and kismet, this is the closest we can get as far as I can tell. Although it offers no clue for God's next move, it does illustrate that a small state change in life could mean dramatic consequences. If something is in your destiny, that state is bound to be reached no matter how impossible it looks like from the humongous state space.
As many of you might know, I'm also a movie buff. One of my all time favorite is "A Chinese Odyssey" (by Stephen Chow, Athena Chu etc.). In the second installment of this movie (Ref [2]), the monkey king (Stephen Chow) successfully drew the sword out of the sheath, which is a sign that he is the preordained husband of Violet fairy (Athena Chu). So the Violet fairy asked him with hesitation that "There is a preordained marriage for me, but ...", and what the monkey king said was: "Don't worry about anything else. That is your kismet, and kismet trumps!" (你管他那麽多，上天安排的最大嘛!). Yes, kismet trumps, and destiny will prevail. And just like the movie, God will put his arrangement in the kismet, and it might also give you a sign from time to time to guide you to your destination. If your mom was told by a fortune-telling monk that her little daughter would one day fly over the ocean to be with her husband on the other side of the Pacific, would you take that seriously? Have you ever thought that a last minute phone call could bring someone you never know before to your side from thousands of miles away? Distance and time can never match the power of karma. (Mr. Einstein must be on the same page with me for this conclusion:-)
And welcome to the land of freedom, honey!!
References:
[1] Probability and Random Processes with Applications to Signal Processing (3rd Edition), Henry Stark, John W. Woods, Prentice-Hall, 2002
