Bank holiday this Monday- and the rain forecast makes a jump up on Sunday night. So why is it that it is always bank holidays that it rains. It has been so dry for weeks up to now.
Why is it that things always go wrong? Why is it that toast always lands butter side down? Why is it that when people forget to play the lottery one week their numbers come up?
Actually it is a lot to do with how we see the world.
I used to walk along a country lane to work. I arrived early and there were never any cars driving past (good thing – there were sharp bends and no footpath). One day I walked along a little later and the lane had quite a few cars.
It struck me that I could easily have concluded, based on my normal time, that the lane hardly ever had traffic. But if I had normally walked a little later I could have concluded the lane was busy.
What would the lane look like if I watched it over a whole day? What would I conclude if I watched it for a month? Or maybe for 10 years?
I imagine it must have been difficult to plot the movement of the planets when people thought they all rotated around the earth (we were the centre of the universe). Once we realised all the planets circled the sun it would make things easier for us.
To get the right view of the world we need to choose the right viewpoint.