Patterns and predictions, Knowledge and insight.
I love explanations, the process of guessing cause and effect, then testing it.
I love little bits of info that can explain big picture processes.
I love tools that help visualize comparisons and simplify complex relationships.
Maybe that is my biggest turn-on: simplification;
To answer multiple convoluted questions with one simple rule solution.
The ultimate goal of science is to explain with simplicity.
I love Occam’s razor:
The simplest explanation is usually the correct explanation.
Occam’s razor is the golden rule of good science.
Occam’s razor extends in all directions, pervades all human experience.
Evolution is a good example:
We could create the concept of “God”, an omnipotent supernatural invisible entity that created everything we see:
Including flesh fly maggots that require eating the eyeballs of cute little animals to complete their life cycle –
What a guy!
Or life and evolution could just be the by product of the simplest rule of physics:
Hot things become cold over time.
Energy flows in a predictably unidirectionally way:
Heat, mass and information move from higher concentration, an overflowing source, to the hungry sink drain.
Life and evolution are simply the natural consequence of moving forward in time:
Just as a bowl of soup inevitably moves from hot to cold,
The energy in the universe wants to dissipate.
Our universe alternates between poles of singularity (1) and a homogeneous dissipation of mass and energy, spread so evenly and thinly that all interactions are with the past (0);
Imagine a ball of ten atoms in a clump with all energy and space squeezed so tightly that even the space around it is contained within it.
It pops, simultaneously imploding from infinite gravity and exploding as it passes through itself, turning inside out, invaginating, a donut convection cell that cycles inside to out to inside.
That is life: the dissipation of energy from the sun to a slime on the planet that dances to speed the pace of energy spreading; hot to cold.
Those ten atoms keep flying outward, so far and for so long that they forget each other exist, can’t see or detect each other.
But they are connected at the origin and the energy that was once concentrated there; the hot epicenter but now cold bowl of soup now acts as a negative pole, pulling all particles on a path of return.
The vacuum lying in the wake of those speedy particles, the echo of “is”, now “was”. Left behind, the currents of energy that blew the ten atoms to the outside of the universe now begin to suck them back in.
And the process repeats.
Nature and science favor efficiency; the fastest and easiest path.
In this way, complexity evolves from simplicity because the easiest way to spread heat is convection.
What was without pattern, having never seen matter and energy, now echos and calls for its return.
Cells of the hottest particles will stream towards the coolness.
Cool particles will move towards the source of heat to take on energy, then use the energy to transport that energy back out towards the coldest regions where the dumped energy is hardly detectable, scattered across the universe.
This convection cell is the inevitable result of energy dissipation in our universe.
It is a donut and many of them can be connected in one cup of coffee.
You can see it when you put that cream in it.
Go ahead.
It is the shape of a tree, taking water from the roots and evaporating from the leaves into the atmosphere.
In the opposite direction, the tree leaves gather light from the sun, make light into sugar, and pass the sugar to its roots and out into the soil for others to eat.
Then we eat the plants, into our mouth hole and out the other side of the donut. Into the soil, now it’s the plant’s turn.
Eat my poo, plant, and efficiently turn that carbon into a celery stalk I will munch in a couple weeks.
Don’t worry, I’ll give it back.
Let’s make this universe cool again!
So you can see, this is by far the most simple explanation.
I hardly had to use more words than “God made life that way”.
I love the word parsimony.
It just means Occman’s razor, simplest is best, but speaks in terms of evolution.
The story with the fewest steps required to explain how or why an organism came to manifest its current state is most likely to be true.
Just as this essay is so simple, it must be the best, truest explanation.
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