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Invisible, otherwise undetectable, luck can be known only by its works. It is the strange, unknowable force that deposited Lana Turner in a Schwab's pharmacy 46 years ago, that placed a football in Franco Harris' hands ("the immaculate reception") at the end of the Pittsburgh-Oakland championship game in 1972, that put Carl Bernstein in the newsroom of the Washington Post a few hours after the police found a strange collection of characters at the Watergate. (Actually, Watergate was a regular soap opera of the fortuitous: if one of the burglars had not stupidly left tape over the latch of a rear door, the night watchman might never have discovered the caper and Congress might never have investigated and the White House tape system might never have been revealed and Richard Nixon might never have resigned.) Luck was the invisible hand that prompted Skylab to scatter its debris over Western Australia, not rush-hour Manhattan. Even transcendently foresighted NASA might admit that the space shuttle's flawless flight last week involved some luck. The luck of the universe (by one new theory) once banged an immense asteroid into the earth, raising a dust cloud so dense that it blocked off the sunlight, ruined the planet's food chain, and thereby brought on the extinction of the dinosaurs—an event that profoundly redirected evolution. It is arguable (at least agnostically for a moment) that life itself—the lightning in the sugar cube, the huge fortuities of weather and climate and chemistry, of amino acids and proteins and oxygen—emanates from sheer cosmic luck.
To call it Divine Providence would do just as well. The religious mind, with a more orderly or merely fatalistic sense of the universe, tends to ascribe to Providence (however mysterious its intentions) events that the more worldly credit to luck, good or bad. People who believe in luck aren't particularly rationalist either, however, since scientific rationalism has as much trouble dealing with luck as theology does. The best it has to offer is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that it is absolutely impossible to predict the exact behavior of atomic particles. Luck is a weird, pagan, primitive business. Or else, in modern dress, it is a frigidly heartless existentialism. In any case, whatever its occasionally whimsical moments, luck has a philosophically terrifying core.
The world has adopted two different strategies toward luck. Much of the planet for most of its history has tried to woo and conjure and appease it, longingly courting the force to draw near, to descend from the void of the random for an instant and shower fortune on some lucky head. To ward off luck's malevolent side, the infection of a curse, the evil eye, populations have danced and chanted and worked with charms. To predict its whims, they have studied omens, birds' flights, goats' entrails; they have consulted gypsies and star charts.