.
If you were speaking by radio, with alien creatures on some
other planet, (let’s assume rapid audio-only communication), how would you
explain to them which was your right hand or left?
The fancy word for this topic is “chirality,” and your life
depends on it. Chirality is the reason
why your right hand is different from your left. It is also the reason why certain molecules
of sugar (right-handed) are nutritious, and others (left-handed) are not (and
indeed can be harmful).
Here is the problem for both physics and metaphysics: is the universe itself, chiral? Is it right-handed or left, clockwise or anti-clockwise?
Modern physics has assured us that physical laws operate the
same regardless of the arrow of time.
The same chemical reactions occur whether going forward in time, or in
reverse. The only difference is
thermodynamic, but regardless of that, the universe is symmetric: half of it is the mirror image of the other
half, but the two halves are not inter-changeable. One cannot substitute left with right.
All biological life forms on earth have the same biochemical
chirality. Organic molecules in living
creatures are chiral in the same direction.
The same molecules, but of opposite chirality, do not function in living
creatures.
This may apply only on earth, but we do not know. Life forms on other planets should, if
chirality is NOT essential for life, have random chirality that in half the
instances, differs from ours. But, if all
life forms everywhere have the SAME chirality, this would indicate that the
universe is inherently chiral, that is, either right-handed or left, clockwise
or anti-clockwise.
There is a bit of evidence for a chiral universe in the
proportion of matter to anti-matter.
Matter is by far the predominant form of ordinary atomic matter, and
anti-matter is exceedingly rare. The mainstream
theory is that as matter and anti-matter annihilate each other, a slight
imbalance in their original proportion, favors the survival of matter, and that
the original imbalance was due only to random chance. If one flips a coin a billion times, the
likelihood is that one will not obtain an exactly equal balance of both heads
and tails. There will be slightly more
of one than the other, but with no preference for which.
If the universe has an inherent property of chance, built-in
(so to speak), then that is an important fact for both physics and metaphysics.
If not, then there are many possibilities to consider. For example, there might very well be a
preference, a preferred outcome of random events. Another speculation for explaining a
preferred chirality (if there is a preference) is that the universe is
rotating. This seems almost
unimaginable, but in the many-universe theory, it is not only possible, but
likely, at least as far as we can extrapolate.
On earth, there are two preferred chiralities for windstorms
such as hurricanes and cyclones, one for the northern hemisphere, and the
opposite for the southern, due to the earth’s rotation. Might there be two preferred chiralities in
the universe?
Therefore, to answer the opening question, perhaps we could,
after all, be able to tell the aliens which of our hands is on the right. That is, if we could agree on the preferred
hemi-verse.
For more on chirality, there are internet links such as the
one at
.
No comments:
Post a Comment