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Saturday, December 23, 2006

Belief.

You believe that I am going to hell in exchange for your personal ticket to heaven.

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Magic Numbers and Random Chance

I just had a strange thought after looking at lots of numbers in nature. Are numbers found in nature exactly equally rare? Are there magic numbers that occur more frequently in nature than other numbers? For example, the number of leaves on a tree, if you take a million random snapshots of a million moments in a tree's life, and do it for a million trees, what kind of distribution would you get?

Would you get a distribution that is fairly level, or will you have peaks at certain magic numbers? For example, i predict there will be a huge peak at 2 simply because leaves grow in pairs when they come out of a seed.

And what does this test prove?

It proves that one of our basic assumptions about the world might just be wrong. If the distribution is fairly level, we can say that in the case of a tree, during a randomly selected time, we will get a random number of leaves. Because random means that over the long run, every number is equally likely to appear.

However, if we get a discontinuous series of numbers, then we can say in the case of a tree, at any random time, we might get some number of leaves more likely than other numbers. This means that we can't assume in biology that the world is filled with random distributions. Then, there is a problem, because chemistry and physics rely on the random assumption, that things move randomly, that chemical reactions occur through random interactions.

Where then does the random stop? Where then does the order arise from chaos?