Nucleosynthesis (pretty readable link from Wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosynthesis i think my favourite result from all this was the realization that just about all the gold in the world was created in stellar collapse. Kind of symbolic when i look at my wedding rings :)
As for "1", that's a human concept, so I would assume that as soon as someone thought about "1', they thought about "not 1" in some sense. So now you've got two. There is, at least as far as I can remember, no "need" in physical science. Stuff happens or it doesn't. If the universe was of infinite duration (doesn't look likely these days) then everything with a non-zero probability of occurring will occur (with probability approaching one). I remember way back when back in intro quantum calculating interesting things, like the probability of all the air in a room will find itself briefly under a table, or if you take something the size of a jumbo jet and crash it every second into something the size of Mt. Everest, how long would it take before you had a 50% probability of it passing though unscathed. Fuin stuff, sounds silly, but the physics that underlies it is what allows for real things like radioactive decay. As for art and error, I think it's too much like nucleosynthesis to worry too much about it. Rather than thinking about "good' and "bad", "kitsch" and "fine", etc; it's more interesting to look at what survives, and why, and wonder about stuff that didn't. Cheers; Chris On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 6:05 PM, William Conger <[email protected]> wrote: > If there was no need, it wouldn't have happened, scientifically. > > The question can be refined: Of the possible responses to need, why did > one/some occur and not another/others? > wc > > > ----- Original Message ---- > From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Sent: Mon, November 12, 2012 11:02:24 AM > Subject: Re: Error and quality > > On Nov 11, 2012, at 4:04 PM, William Conger <[email protected]> wrote: > >> It is reasonable to say that in Nature there are no errors. >> >> Your question really is, Why do people find error in Nature? > > I was thinking of "error" in the scientific or mathematical sense of > variation, more than in the sense of wrong judgment. Perhaps I should call it > "differentiation": how did hydrogen become helium? How did one become two? Of > the infinity of numbers, there is only one "1," one undifferentiated unity. > There is no diversification in one, no differentiation. But when there are > two, there can be differences. As I ponder this idea, I wonder if there was an > original "need" for diversification. The Big Bang produced many entities. How > was it that they were different rather than all being identical, all being the > same kind, all charmed quarks or Higgs bosons or other identical elemental > particles? > > > > | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | > Michael Brady
