There are people who are said to be born under an unlucky star. Trouble falls on them like a horn of plenty. Another would have had enough adversity for the rest of his life that a loser experiences in a year. But there are people with whom there are, as it were, selective, purposeful troubles. Always the same And there is simply no need to talk about blind accidents here.
Such was, for example, the grandfather of the great poet George Byron, Vice Admiral of the British Navy John Byron. From fellow sailors, he received the nickname "Byron - Bad Weather".
And there was a reason. Not a single case was noted when he had to swim under a clear sky. Even if the sun was shining overhead, it immediately hid behind storm clouds as soon as his ship went out to sea.
And the downpour began, which did not stop as long as the voyage continued.
As a result, the vice admiral constantly got into accidents, and many ships that had the misfortune to sail with him simply perished in the abyss.
The impression is that John Byron was drawing storm clouds to himself.
An even more unique "storehouse" of troubles, as the St. Petersburg explorer A. Savenkov testifies, was one of the eighteen members of the crew of the schooner "Mermaid", which left the port of Sydney in October 1829.
Who it was is unknown, and, probably, he himself did not suspect that he would bring such trouble to the sailors. But it can be argued with a high degree of probability that such a person was on the schooner.
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The vessel was sailing in the Torres Strait, heading for Rafles Bay. Between Australia and New Guinea, in an area extremely dangerous for navigation, they got into thick fog and landed on reefs. The ship sank in a matter of minutes, but people were saved - on bare stones, without food and water, they washed for three days.
On the fourth, they were picked up by a passing bark "Sweatshu" with a team of fourteen people. To my misfortune I picked it up: two days later, in completely similar conditions, it ran into pitfalls and sank. Now, on the tiny island, again without food and water, two teams with two captains were already in poverty. And again they were lucky: soon they were taken aboard by the schooner "Governor Radi", sailing to Papua. People were jubilant, especially the "Mermey-da" team: still, survive two disasters! Now nothing bad will happen.
No matter how it is! As soon as the schooner moved away from the island, a fire broke out on it. For several hours, all three teams fought with fire, but to no avail. They had to leave the dying ship, and now 64 people with three captains embarked on an unreliable voyage on three boats.
And again they were lucky. Soon all those in distress are picked up by the warship Komet. His sailors listen to the story with understandable disbelief: there simply cannot be such incredible coincidences. It turned out, maybe. Suddenly a storm came, for which those latitudes are famous, and the seemingly reliable ship sank. Among the raging waves, 85 sailors and four captains had already drifted for 18 hours on four overloaded boats.
And again they were saved. The small sailing ship "Jupiter" barely accommodated all the victims. Among them there was clearly one who attracted misfortune. And "Jupiter" repeated the fate of "Mermaid" and "Sweatshu": broke the bottom on the reef, and now there were 123 sailors and five captains on the slippery rocks.
Only for the sixth time did fate take pity on the unfortunate. The passing schooner City of Leeds with 100 passengers picked up all the participants in this unique series of disasters and took them to Australia.
What are the reasons for fatal bad luck or rare luck? Konstantin Korotkov, a doctoral student of the St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics, expresses his opinion on this issue. For many years he has been studying the phenomena that have received the name "paranormal".
- Now in the world science the opinion is affirmed that nothing happens by accident, - says Konstantin Georgievich. - But here it is easy to go to extremes. If we admit that everything is generally natural, then we come to Newtonian determinism, according to which everything is initially determined by God's will and nothing depends on man. We believe that a person still influences his destiny. Imagine an ant crawling on a tree. And periodically falls on the branch points.
Modern science calls them bifurcation points. And it is necessary to make a decision in which direction to crawl. Either you climb further along the trunk, or you run into an abyss. So every person on his life path has such points. They are not random. They can be called marks of fate. And it depends on us which way we go. As a rule, when choosing a direction, we focus only on the present moment, not knowing how our choice will affect in years, sometimes tens of years.
The vast majority of people make roughly the same number of mistakes and make the right decision. Therefore, we have a streak of failures alternating with a lucky streak. But there are people with deep intuition. They feel where to direct their path. And there are others - at each point of bifurcation, they choose the wrong direction. This is what defines the lucky and the losers. And when a person is unlucky in everything, it means that he goes across the stream. I have seen such people. As well as people who always feel where to turn.
So, science seems to deny blind chance. Asserts that a person chooses his own destiny. However, this does not explain examples of the most incredible electoral coincidences, which are not so few in world history. More recently, the British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph drew attention to the fact that some women are "incompatible" with electrical appliances. For some reason, only women: devices do not respond to men, but when the fair sex approaches, they begin to rebel.
Such an amazing woman, for example, is Natalie Thomason from Northamptonshire. Demonstrating her "abilities" to scientists, she, without touching the devices, disabled 12 vacuum cleaners, 10 electric irons, 5 televisions, 2 microwave ovens and 3 washing machines. Another woman, Pauline Shaw from Manchester, constantly battles with her own washing machine. When she tries to tune the machine to the desired program, the fuses melt and water splashes onto the floor.
Another Englishwoman, Andy Fry, hears the whisper of light bulbs - a very uncomfortable quality, especially when you want to relax in the evening. Astrophysicist Mike Shallis of the University of Oxford, after four years of research, found that 600 women in the British Isles have similar bioelectric negative characteristics.
Electoral accidents mark both one specific person and a group of people, or even natural phenomena. Suffice it to recall the tragic trip of Japanese schoolchildren, who, under the guidance of their teacher, climbed a low mountain. On the way they were caught by a thunderstorm.
In accordance with the rules of mountaineering, the teacher told them to tie themselves with a safety rope so as not to lose anyone in the pouring rain. This group was struck by lightning and struck every third in a bunch. First, third, sixth, ninth … Why such a terrible selectivity? What is the mathematical relationship between a formidable natural phenomenon and a bunch of climbers? It undoubtedly exists, this connection, only its nature is still unknown.
It has already been said above that there are people marked, so to speak, with the seal of selective luck. The schooner City of Leeds probably had the kind of crew member that ultimately saved everyone else. But all the records were broken by the old lady from Lodz, who was trumpeted by Polish newspapers in the mid-60s.
This cute old lady has won a car in the cash lottery five times in a row. It can be assumed that good intuition allowed her to always correctly determine the direction at the bifurcation points. But once the old woman still gave a blunder, and this affected the sixth lottery draw.
This time she didn’t even bother to check the tickets, but immediately went to get the prize. Imagine her indignation when it turned out that her numbers were empty. Pani was so sure that she became a victim of some kind of fraud that she was not too lazy to go to Warsaw, where she made a scandal with the director of the Central Bank.
So, are there blind accidents, or are all these incredible coincidences the result of some regularity that is still hidden from science? I would like to hope for the latter, because in this case, scientists will someday be able to identify the laws of fate, which means they will learn to control them. Although it is difficult to say whether people will become happier from this, because fate is knowingly hiding the future from us.
In the meantime, how not to recall the wise maxim of Shakespeare's Hamlet: "In the world, my friend Horatio, there are many things that our wise men never dreamed of."