Category: Metaphysics

The Physics of Left and Right

A few years ago, I wrote a post called “The Metaphysics of Left and Right (No, Not Politics; the Freakin Directions!),” in which I suggested that our ability to tell left from right, even as young children, and when facing a completely symmetrical landscape like the plane of the ocean, is somehow suggestive of a deeper truth about the nature of consciousness and dualism. As part of this philosophical (and very possibly harebrained) rumination, I explored how difficult it would be to communicate our definitions of left and right to a distant extraterrestrial civilization using only words or very simple pictures. One way, I argued, would be to use the inherent chirality of certain molecules, whose structure our hypothetical E.T. would recognize.

So, you can imagine my delight at discovering that one of my favorite YouTube channels, PBS Space Time, devoted an entire episode to this very subject. As host Matt O’Dowd explains, all biological life displays a mysterious homochirality, or bias toward either left- or right-handedness over the other. All DNA, for example, spirals the same way. Similarly, all sugar and amino acid molecules are not only chiral but unflippable. That is, their mirror images are never found in nature. And when these reversed molecules are deliberately created in a lab, they are biologically useless and, often, highly toxic. Not to mention totally…unnatural.

Even now, in the 21st Century, no one is sure why this handedness in nature exists, although it is theorized that it might be connected to the most fundamental laws of nature—specifically, the asymmetry of the weak force.

It’s pretty cool. Check it out….

The Coolest Discovery You’ve Never Heard Of

I recently learned that this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics went to a team of scientists who conducted experiments on quantum tunneling. Their experiments were conducted in the 1980s, which is typical of how the Nobel committees work—it takes around thirty years for a scientific consensus to build that a body of work was truly worthy of a Nobel Prize. 

I was interested in this news because, like most sci-fi nerds, I have an unflagging fascination with quantum mechanics. Heck, I even have a passing understanding of the fundamentals. (No, not just from Star Trek; I’ve read a few actual books! With facts, and stuff!)  A few years ago, I even tried to write a non-fiction book about Bell’s Theorem, which is a famous consent in Quantum Mechanics, albeit one that  you’ve probably never heard of (unless you’re a physicist or a science teacher or a sci-fi nerd). 

John Stewart Bell (copyright CERN)

To be frank, I had never heard of it either, until I read about it in a science book and then ventured to the Wikipedia page, where I learned that the theorem was written by an Anglo-Irish physicist named John Stewart Bell in the 1960s, and it hit the scientific community like a hurricane. Later, in 1975, another physicist Henry Stapp called it “the most profound discovery of science.”

When I read this quote, I thought, “Whoa, dude! If it’s really the most ‘profound discovery of science’,” I should probably learn something about it.” 

And I did. Sort of.

Obviously, I will never really understand the underlying math, or even the root concepts that the math represents (which is one reason I abandoned the aforementioned book project). But the theorem itself is pretty easy to understand….

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