Ringer!

I played horseshoes a few months back, the first time I've tossed hunks of metal that will never see the bottom of a horse's hoof in many, many years. In the span of a long game--neither of us were very good--I had a grand total of one ringer, and I think that was a matter of dumb luck. I'm reminded of that as I read about the discovery by the Hubble Telescope of a "double Einstein ring." I must admit that I didn't know what an Einstein ring, single or double, was until I read this posting on the topic. In short, it involves two (or three) galaxies being perfectly aligned to our eyes so that the gravitation within the nearer one(s) bend the light of the farther one(s). The result is something like we see in this photo.

What are the odds of something like this being out there? I don't know, but they're probably about as long as me being able to successfully run both ends of a basketball alley oop. One of the report's readers notes the improbability of it all:

"The light left the first galaxy, 11 billion years ago, 5 billions years later it went past the next galaxy, 3 billion years later it swung past the next one (by that point the first two probably had moved and were not aligned with the third), and then 3 billion years later, this twice bent light hits the Hubble, by which point no three (much less all four counting us) of the galaxies are actually in the same line. "

Now what does all of this have to do with your success as a student? Let me be completely clear that you should never take physics instruction from this old English professor. I took physics (for the first and only time) as a senior in high school and wasn't certain that I had passed until I received my diploma at graduation.

What I can tell you, however, is that good academic results do not happen by random chance. I got a lousy grade in physics after I left that class largely to chance, hoping that the galaxies would align and all would be well. That didn't work out very well. It probably won't work out well either.

Good results, rather like an Einstein ring, can come about by accident, but you don't want to bank your future on it.