Professor of Luck

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Professor of luck The article for rendering is entitled “Professor of luck”. It is an interview with an English professor Richard Weisman who studies the laws of people’s good and bad luck and carries out experiments in order to find out what makes us lucky or unlucky. The author of the article introduces Prof. Weisman as a very unusual person – he used to perform tricks in a circus before becoming a British “scientific luminary”. The things he is studying now may be considered non-scientific by many scholars – parapsychology, extrasensory perception, physiology of ghosts and the like. In 1994 he started a project “Luck” involving 400 volunteers who let professor and his team study their private life events in order to make conclusions about their good or bad luck. The results of the experiment were published and the book became a bestseller despite being written in a scientific language. Answering the question whether he really believes that all people can be divided into lucky and unlucky ones, prof. Weisman gives a few examples proving that fact – he mentions a very lucky jewelry shops owner and a very unlucky flight attendant. He does not agree that human life is just a set of coincidences. However, prof. Weisman is convinced that different omens, amulets and lucky charms do not work at all and are nothing more that superstitions. He explains that every omen is an echo of some ancient beliefs about saints or witches. People could not explain some things and invented their own explanations for them. Prof. Weisman and his colleagues even carried out an experiment, subjecting their volunteers to some famous omens (for example, making black cats cross their road or spilling salt and so on), but it didn’t bring them any disasters. All in all, prof. Weisman concludes that people who consider themselves to be lucky are simply more
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