Good Luck Professor Spiegelhalter
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 12 January 2018
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rhianna Dhillon brings you another seriously interesting story from Radio 4.
This week, luck.
Whether we believe in luck or not, we do use the word- a lot! More as a figure of speech than an article of faith perhaps but some do pray for luck, others fantasise about it - and bad luck or misfortune is a staple of comedy
Can luck be said to exist as some force in our lives and if so, what is its nature? How have people thought about luck in the past and what's changed today? Can you bring good luck upon yourself - there's a school of thought these days that thinks you can without appealing to the divine or supernatural.
In Good Luck Professor Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University looks at notions of luck in gambling, traces the origins of how we think about fate and fortune, the religious and psychological view of luck and how the emergence of theory of probability changed our view of it.
He is convinced by the philosopher Angie Hobbs that there is one form of luck it is rational to believe in and by psychologist Richard Wiseman that there is a secular solution to bringing about good fortune in your life.
Good Luck Professor Spiegelhalter, is presented by David Spiegelhalter and produced in Salford by Kevin Mousley.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box. |
| 0:05.0 | The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from. |
| 0:09.0 | And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.0 | The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.5 | The IRA inmates who found a way. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path |
| 0:19.5 | through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history. |
| 0:25.0 | The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them. |
| 0:28.5 | Escape from the Maze, listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:34.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:36.0 | Hi, I'm Riana Dylan, and this is seriously. Today we're wishing Professor Spiegelhaulter |
| 0:49.1 | good luck. Not that he'd want us to. |
| 0:52.4 | One. Not that he'd want us to. |
| 0:53.0 | One, heads, two. |
| 0:58.0 | It's a phrase we use a lot. |
| 1:00.0 | Good luck. |
| 1:01.0 | Or wish me luck. Some people pray for good fortune, others laugh at bad luck on TV. |
| 1:08.0 | But is it possible to make your own luck? |
| 1:11.0 | I think it all comes down to hard work. I don't think it has |
| 1:14.9 | any do with the alignment in the stars or anything. I just think if you work then you'll |
| 1:18.9 | get what you want. If I want something then I go for it. I have to do something to get that luck. |
| 1:26.5 | Today is seriously is good luck Professor Spiegel Halter and I don't believe in luck. I can't afford to. I'm a statistician |
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