Seven Years

Superstition has it that breaking a mirror brings you seven years of bad luck. What if this were really true?

If the superstition is true then it would create certain difficulties. What if two people both broke mirrors, and then played each other in an important contest of some kind? Let’s say, for example, that they were both top-level chess masters and were going head to head in a world competition. How could they both have bad luck at the same time? Would a stalemate count as bad luck, or would only losing the game be bad enough to qualify? If the latter, then we have a problem, because they can’t both lose. The only real solution to this would be for some external event to finish the game prematurely. The best way, therefore, to look for evidence that this superstition is a real phenomenon, is to be on the lookout for international chess matches being hit by meteorites or struck by lightning and exploding, killing the players. Good luck with that.

Anyway, let’s go further with this. Let’s assume that the superstition does hold. I’m not going to speculate on how we’d know this, but perhaps several international sporting finals have been wiped out by rocks from space, and you’re beginning to get a tad suspicious.

In that case, how many possible explanations could there be for the phenomenon itself? Let’s look at some.

1. Quantum Multiverse

Assume there’s some unknown mechanism that makes the bad luck happen by ensuring that you experience only Everett Branches that are bad for you for the next seven years.

One way to achieve this would be that the other versions of you who would have ended up in positive branches are all destroyed. Because people’s experiences are all separate in the multiverse, everyone else would usually find themselves in a branch in which you were dead. And therefore, from the point of view of other people, anyone who broke a mirror would die fairly soon afterwards. Which would be a bit of a giveaway.

On the other hand, perhaps those other versions of you are not destroyed: perhaps they’re all p-zombies. Therefore anyone you know who has ever broken a mirror and subsequently had any amount of good luck, however small, must be a p-zombie – and you can kill them without feeling guilty. Do not, however, expect the courts to accept your justifications.

2. Actual Magic

If the superstition operates through something outside of physics (which I’m calling magic), then we don’t have much of a chance to discover how it works. This is why magic is boring. Next item, please.

3. Simulation

If the universe is a simulation, then some interesting possibilities are opened up by the idea that the mirror superstition works. I’ll leave aside the rather intriguing question of why it has been programmed into the system, and talk about how it might operate. If you were writing such a simulation, how would you implement the superstition?

First of all, you need some code that identifies a mirror. Before the evolution of life forms capable of making mirrors, this would be dormant code, of course. If the simulation began after the discovery of mirrors, then you’d need to pre-identify all the mirrors in the physical space, and also set things up so that every time somebody made one, it was added to the list of mirrors. If the simulation began before the discovery of mirrors, things would be a little trickier. The earliest mirrors would have been very crude, and not very similar to their modern counterparts, so you’d need a threshold definition of when something becomes a mirror. Does a polished metal surface count? Probably not. What about a piece of glass with a black cloth behind it, and a candle above? Better have some solid code to identify the threshold, or you’ll stumble at the first hurdle.

Once you have your list of mirrors in the universe, what about the breakage? What counts as “breaking”? If you take a small chip off one corner, does that count? If so, how small a chip? Just knocking the glass with a jacket button could remove some molecules. Is that breakage? If not, where’s the line?

We could test for this in real life, by distributing a number of mirrors to test subjects and asking them all to break them to exact and precisely controlled degrees, then monitoring their luck for seven years. Of course, if they’re p-zombies who are simply having normal luck but aren’t experiencing it (see item 1), then the experiment will fail because we’ve no way of knowing.

4. Conspiracy

Another possibility is that there’s a secret society of shadowy people whose job is to seek out mirror-breakers and make their lives hell for seven years. I’m not sure I’d want that sort of job myself, but I’ve no doubt there are some who might enjoy it. Next time you break a mirror, take a good look around. If there’s movement at your window, perhaps a mirror breakage spy has rushed off to report you and add you to the list.

Of course, the obvious conclusion to all this silliness is simply that the superstition is utter nonsense.

But then, I would say that, wouldn’t I? Perhaps I’m part of the conspiracy.