Is God a Lazy Plumber?

13:27

Last Friday I had the privilege of going to a talk by CERN physicists Dr. Archana Sharma and Dr. Mick Storr. While the talk itself was unremarkable due to lack of technical depth (they tried to make it accessible to non-physics majors in the audience as well, but didn't, leaving no one satisfied).
But it wasn't a wasted day. Before the talk began, I happened to meet and talk to a fellow high-school physicist She and I started talking about a topic that fascinates me quite a bit - the outward acceleration of space.
Quick background: The universe is expanding quickly, we know this because of the Doppler Effect, which describes how light wave (any wave actually) 'elongates' when the source moves away from the point of observation. i.e. the wavelength increases, causing a red-shift. We see that with stars, they exhibit a red-shift more often than not, indicating that they are moving away from us, hence, space is moving away from us, expanding. In fact it's moving away from every point of observation. I like to look at stars as ink blots on a balloons skin, when you blow the balloon, the stars all move away from each other, hence moving away form all points of observation.
If this isn't fascinating enough, the stars are actually accelerating away from us. That's quite absurd, we know that for an object with mass to accelerate, a force must be applied to it. Newton's second law. For a force to be applied, energy must be expended. But where is this huge amount of energy coming from?
We call this mysterious energy 'dark energy'. We know nothing about it, and it fascinates me every-time I think about it.
Back to Friday. My friend pointed out a pretty interesting idea. She said that the stars would be being pulled outwards by the mass of adjacent universes. Super massive universes all pulling each other apart, growing rapidly with each others assistance.
The talk ended at 1:30pm, and I took the bus home. On the way I couldn't help but this about this concept. What if there were infinite neighboring multiverses, all pulling each other apart. Like fractals. Infinite universes pulling each other outwards, their gravity 'leaking'. The multiverses could exist on multiple levels, like fractals. So infinite multiverses won't be adjacent, they would be within each other.

$Image result for fractal$

But where does one universe end and the next begin? Watch out for the next post to find out.
I'm Daksh Gupta, and as always, never stop asking questions.

What does it feel like to be a fish?

21:04

Very human. Well, having seen my promptness in reply, the reader is likely to doubt my, humanness. No. I am not a fish. To some extent well.

Picture yourself on pier. The rustic reclaimed wood lies inches from the calm, collected lake. From the side, the deep brown of the wood meets the violent green of the moss in an everlasting battle for visual supremacy. The pier overlooks the pond like a mysterious, distant, silent watcher. On the surface are dried leaves of yellow and green. A soft breeze fights the water, dragging it like it’s a battle mace in a warzone. Bubbles float to the water surface and escape their circular prisons into a new, free world. Beneath the surface is a school of fish. They’re very regular fish. They don’t say much of anything, and occasionally let out air from their gills. The fish has never come so near to the surface before, but even so, finds it impossible to surface. The sun shines brightly for the fish to see, but the fish sees nothing. The light is reflected off of the bed of leaves. In an inexplicable turn of events, your foot gently taps the water, and ripples rush outwards in nature’s perfect concentric circles. The fish are alarmed. “What is this weird movement at the edge of the universe?” As they see the leaves they though they know all about rock left to right.

The universe? Well, yes. The universe is all within your perception and nothing else. The fish see nothing but the water they are in. That is their universe.

Meanwhile in the fishiverse, the fish notice the dried leaves on the surface knock from side to side with the ripples, this mysterious dark energy, that affects distant objects.

So much for fish.

Well, you are an astrophysicist! Your lunchtime ended a full hour ago, and you are here at the pier, talking about fish physics. Walking back into your lab, you get the regular ‘hellos’ from your advisor, the janitor and the guy from the marine biology department who seems to spend all his time next to the water dispenser.

“Hey come here!” A loud voice sends a shattering whiplash to your brain, and you turn around and run to the auditory source. Look at this! The source says as he points to a screen with a rather satisfying spike in its graph.

“Is this…” You begin to ask.

“These stars are accelerating away from us, all of them!”

“But what’s pushing them?”

“I think someone tapped their foot on the pond again.” Says one of the fish.

“In the end, we are simply fish that don’t surface. We try our best to understand the things we can’t touch and comprehend the phenomenon we cannot explain.”

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

The Lion's Tail

21:03

Which is the purest science?

21:01

How many dimensions are there?

21:00

Three, is what most people would tell you. They would be half correct.

The current physical theories work well in 4 dimensions. They are length, breadth, width, and time. Time? Well yes. The best way I have found the concept of time as a dimension to be explained is this. I need to provide my co-ordinates to a fellow human, to meet for coffee. I say the length, 7th street. I say the breadth, 11th avenue. I say the height, second floor. But I am still missing one coordinate. 5:30 pm, because without that information, fellow human would not be fully aware of the meeting point.

Therefore, time too, is a dimension.

Four dimensions. Settled.

Or is it?

Einstein is known to have compared what he calls god’s grand design to a lion, and modern scientific pursuit, an attempt to study the tail. Perhaps he was saying that the rest of this lion, is not in a world we can see. A world, beyond our perception. How do we see this world? We don’t have to, a pre-Einstein physicist already did.

In his eerie and haunting science work, ‘Flatland’ Edwin A. Abbott describes a world that he never saw. The fifth dimension.

Imagine a two-dimensional world, he said. Common intuition suggests that 2 dimensions are an inferior reality we see every day. Well, no. Can you imagine anything with no up or down? Probably not. But try. A purely two-dimensional world where there is no up or down. A line drawn around a man is a prison. The only way to across something, is to literally work around it.

What would a sphere look like to a world like that? Let’s imagine a sphere moving through this ‘flat land’ The sphere would appear to a point. As the sphere moved further, the point would become a growing circle. The circle would suddenly stop growing. The circumference. Classic sphere. It moves further, the circle shrinks to the point that it was born out of. Null. Void. Devoid, rather, of dimensions.

Dimensions.

Dimensions?

Dimensions.

Laughter.

Abbott has done the impossible. Abbott is a genius. Abbott, has seen worlds that man cannot even imagine. He subtracted one.

Don’t you see it?

The beauty of it?

In our pathetic 3-dimensional world, a four dimensional objects moving through would be three dimensional objects appearing, shifting shape, and disappearing.

Welcome.

I haven’t answered the question.

Answers. Boring. One dimensional.

Questions. That’s more like it. Uncertain. Unpredictable. Provocative.

What will I find at the other end? The higher dimension. Answers, and questions.

What is nothing?

20:57

I like to look at the way my brain works from time to time. Look deep within, and search for the source code that runs this immensely stupid, yet sophisticated program. Deciphering this code is fun. It lets you have unreal control over your metal capabilities. You control your thoughts and actions, not carbon based natural compounds. But I hit dead ends sometimes, dissatisfying moments when I find a chink in the armor. A thing I cannot compute, and I have a feeling no one can. Unanswered questions, exciting ideas that are stored safely beneath distracting layers of delusion and superficiality. I find things I cannot imagine. I couldn’t imagine a universe with no earth, all my happiness, sadness, worries, ideas are stored, tucked away in a tiny planet, without which there would be lack of everything I know about. But should I try enough, I could imagine it. What’s more, I can even imagine a world with no matter, just vast empty space. But what about a world with no space. A nothing that is not a lack of matter, but true nothingness, not just empty space. It’s mind boggling to even think about, because it seems impossible to do so. The universe is expanding, the Doppler Effect proved it. But is space is expanding, what lays beyond it, what is it covering as it gets bigger? I have two theories.

The first one. Imagine an expanding balloon, with polka dots to represent stars. Space is on this surface, and as the balloon expands, the space expands, as does the interstellar distances.

The second one is a little haunting. Space has been expanding since the beginning of the universe, 13.8 billion years ago. During this time, it has expanded 94 billion lightyears. If you have read the previous parts of this book, you’ll know that nothing travels faster than light through space. But it doesn’t prevent space from moving faster than light. So if space travels faster than light, by the cosmic speed limit, no one can ever go and see what lays beyond the boundary, if there is one. It’s theoretically impossible to know. It seems like the universe could not think of something to put beyond space, so it made it impossible for us to find out.

In conclusion, well, I have nothing much to say. Nothing at all, actually.

Fibonaturally.

20:55

I want to kill my grandfather, should I be worried?

20:54

Frankly, yes. Unless of course you are referring to the great ‘Grandfather Paradox’ a time paradox that has been perplexing physicists for way too many years.

In a nutshell, it intends to disallow time travel to the past, by saying that if you went back in time and killed your grandfather, you would disallow yourself form being born, raising the question, if you were never born, who killed your grandfather? Let that settle in. Matter of fact, sit back and let that run in your head for a bit.

To prepare you for what impends, let’s lay down some simple truths.

Things cannot vanish, or just disappear into thin air, by the second law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation.

Things can't appear out of nowhere for the same reasons.

Nothing can be at two places at the same time.

Yeah. We have common sense. That's what tells us about all these facts above. So let's get rid of this presumption parasite. For that, we have to super small. Billions of times smaller than we are right now. By a few billion times. Let's stand next to a hydrogen atom. Remember electrons? Those funny negative balls that stay in shells? You were told that they revolve around the nucleus, and they stay in their shells. If you are going to say this to a particle physicist, make sure there's nothing around that is sharp and easy to throw. They don't stay in there shell, and they are not balls. They are not definite structures that revolve the nucleus, 'they' are actually just a weird fuzz around the nucleus. They also suddenly disappear from shell and magically appear in other ones.

It's like going from the 1st floor to the 2nd floor, and not existing on the way.

In your face thermodynamics. Well, actually, thermodynamics is not violated. Yet.

So that's common sense folks. Wait, look at the animation again. Notice that red wave? That's energy. In some form. A simple rule is that electrons go to a higher shell when they get energy and a lower shell when they lose energy. They also exist at two or more places at the same time.

I know it hurt me a little bit to know I will never be able to prevent myself from losing that bag I really liked on vacation a few years ago. But don’t lose all hope. You might still be able to go back in time.

Multiverses:

Physicists consider the possibility there could be more than one parallel universe, or multiverses. So you can go back in time, but you’ll end up in a different past, in a parallel universe, where your actions would not affect your universe, preventing a loop being formed.

But let’s be honest, that’s boring.

The cool one.

You’ve probably heard of Schrodinger’s cat. A PETA approved thought experiment, where a cat is in a sealed box with a nuclear device that has a 50% chance of killing that cat in the next hour. At the end of the hour, at the instant before the box is opened to reveal the answer, that cat is deemed dead and alive. The cat simultaneously lives and dies. The experiment deals with the dual nature of waves and particles, where every particle is simultaneously a wave, hence is located at more than one locations. Where common sense says you can’t be with that in mind, think about the paradox. I kill my grandfather, hence preventing my birth. The story could go two ways, either it carries on, where I am not born, so I don’t kill my grandfather, my grandfather lives, and so on. Alternatively, my grandfather did die, so I didn’t exist, so this patch of time didn’t exist at all. Two possibilities, one solution. One solution. One solution? Why just one? When talking about the Schrodinger’s feline friend, the instant before the box is opened, it does not fall to one solution. Its human intervention that forces the tip to one side. There is a superposition of states. The same could happen in the paradox case. The grandfather is simultaneously dead and alive, two things parallel, at once.

Well, that should sort it. See you back in 1997.

Is the world mathematical?

20:53

If you’ve done high school trigonometry and high school physics, you probably have heard of the sine function. For those of you don’t know, it is a function, which takes in an angle as a parameter and returns the value of the opposite side divided by the hypotenuse in a right triangle amongst other things. In a right triangle with an angles A, B and C, sin (A) = BC/hypotenuse. Like other functions, this function can be plotted on a graph of sin(x) against x. The resultant graph would be a wave. A curvy, mundane looking wave. Look closely, and it may look familiar. It’s the exact same as the graphical representation of a particles displacement against time. Triangle ratios and light seem completely arbitrary, yet have the same representative function. How? Well, as statements get more and more specific, their monumentality diminishes. If a statement affects a large group of people, it is important. If it is too specific, it’s not. The sine problem may sound eerily crazy, until you question its foundation. Look at the graph. It is most likely a Cartesian plane with linear x and y axis scales, with unit increments. Fine, on a 2 dimensional plane with linear scales on the axes, the sine function has these characteristics. This does not sound all that amazing anymore, because linear scales are just one of the many out there. Logarithmic, exponential, and the ones we haven’t even discovered yet. There could be ones that aren’t even compatible with our numbering system.

This brings up the question, what is mathematical? What makes something mathematical? With the right numeral system, anything can be possible. A sine function on a graph with a linear y axis and exponential x axis creates a strange irregular wave. So if math can be bent willfully, what is left? Well, that’s hard to tell. Math, in my opinion, is a fruit of abstract thought. Where it does draw inspiration from nature, it is an independent entity, whose sheer flexibility, makes it unsurprisingly ubiquitous. So in conclusion, yes, the world is mathematical, but no, that’s no mind blowing.

On the flipside, the number system, that seems to align itself so well with nature, has a major chink in its armor. Pi, a value essential to the mensuration of the circle, remains irrational*.

*probably

Speaking of uncertainty.

20:52

One more for the road.

18:08

Well, in between sophomore year and a new project I'm working on, I completely forgot, that April 26th marked a full year of this blog. Man. A full year. I've written 34 posts, clocking over 20,000 words. I've learnt how to write better, and I've learnt so much. I now love physics far more than I ever have. I want to thank all my readers, both of you, for reading all these posts. I hope I got you thinking about this queer little world we live in, and taught you to be curious, and inquisitive, and preach a life of pure thought, in a cup of experimentation. Unfortunately, I won't be writing this often now, because I'll soon go down for boards, and be out till April 2017. But I'd like to give you one for the road.

I've been thinking about life. What lays ahead of me. Can I predict what the next few stages of my life? Well, when a toss of coin, I can be sure it'll be either heads or tails. Or will it? It could land on its side? Be sent to swiss banks as political black money before it lands. You never know. What about things with near perfect predictions of the consequence. When I press the spacebar, a blank character will show up on my screen. But what if the computer freezes, or melts down, or is intercepted remotely by the aliens. The coin, the spacebar, have one thing in common. They have a definitive set of outputs, that have near perfect chances of occurring. Why that blaring uncertainty?

Well, we have to look closely. Very closely. On an atomic scale. If you ever did middle school physics, you have probably heard of brownian motion, the law that states that particles move in a random unpredictable state. If you've done a masters in physics, or like, been on Tumblr, you probably have heard of Schrodinger's cat. The radioactive isotope has a 50-50 chance of decaying in the next hour? Well, Schrodinger taught as something else, aside the fact that if you throw a cat into anything, and everyone will care. You cannot know for sure, what a particle is going to do next. It may blow up. Go left. Go right. Both. Do the Champion dance, you can really never tell. Heisenberg sums this into one neat beautiful equation.

This is famously known as 'The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle'. Even if you know a particle's history, its velocity, mass, size, half-life, to Facebook stalking levels, you can still never be sure what it's going to do next.

Prepare For mind blow.

This is the random that makes everything happen. Imagine trillions of particles, with disjoint fates, doing random things, the possibilities are endless in the most literal way.

So, I can't ever really tell, what my future is going to be, no way. I can shift the probabilities though, influence them, bend them to my will, but never, ever, be certain where I'll go. Maybe to dinner with a schizophrenic walrus. Maybe across the heliopause on the voyager 1. Maybe I'll just watch another episode of Downton.

Well, maybe I'm not just talking on a physical level, because in a deep, intimate way, physics really derives from what we feel. It is our creation. The lens through which we see this world. With this blog, I hoped to change the way people looked at this world. This wild, infinitely untamable uncertainty is so threatening, and yet so liberating. My actions cannot certain anything.

This jungle we call the universe, is such a thrilling adventure. It shows the basic oneness of the human race. We sleep under the same sky. We are moving together, in one direction, to a common destination to the other side of the universe. We eat the same matter, breath the same elements. And we all happily on one lonely planet in a pathetic little corner of a vastly insignificant galaxy, but we don't care. The universe is not important to us, we don't need to know it. We make true meaning to ourselves, and once in awhile, look at the smiling stars, and ask the questions that change the world.

This may be the last time I ever say this, so I'm going to make it count. Goodbye for now internet, I'm Daksh Gupta, and as always, never, ever stop asking questions.

The Ship of Theseus

16:22

You’d say this is too philosophical for this blog. It’s a physics blog. A blog of pure mathematical thinking. You’d be wrong. The Ship of Theseus. I have been wanting to cover this topic for a while, but it was only recently I found a rather interesting application of it in the world of science. But I’ll start you off with a quote from Anand Gandhi’s critically acclaimed art-house film ‘Ship Of Theseus’.

| “Or else, replacing the parts would change the person”

If you don’t know what the Ship of Theseus is, I’ll try to explain it briefly. A ship called say, ‘The Mariner’ was sailing across a vast sea, and on the way whenever a part got worn out it was replaced. By the end of the journey, no original parts of the ship remained, leaving the question, is the ship that arrived at the harbour still ‘The Mariner’?

Think about that for a second, and you’ll eventually come to the question, what is something anyway? What makes something itself? What is a thing's identity? No parts from the original Mariner are left, the ship is entirely comprised of a different atoms, only placed in a similar way as the original. But, is this a new ship? Or the same ship, because that is what it is identified as.

We as a species refresh all of our cells every 10 years, with new ones. I’m fourteen years old. I was Daksh when I was 4 and I am Daksh now. But no part of that existed in 2005, exists now.

Here’s what I define something as. An identity that uniquely distinguishes something from all other entities. Think about this for a second. Anything which is not anything but itself is something. This implies that if I was scanned, and my body was disintegrated and the same patterns of atoms were replicated, with my memories, my body and my thoughts, that new being would still be me. But where does this whack scenario occur?

Teleportation. Quantum teleportation reads you’re quantum state, disintegrates you, and sends this data to another end where it is used to create a replica of me with all my memories until my disintegration occurs. Surreal.

The question of what something is, is infinitely deep. I am Daksh. When I refer to myself as ‘I’, what am I referring to? The quantum state I bear? The arrangement of atoms? Or something tht isn’t physical? Something entirely different.

When I was 7 years old, I lived in a different city. I had a friend I used to sit with on my way to school, in the bus, and one day, I told him to imagine something. What if our entire city did not exist? This entire area was just never there? What if the earth didn’t exist? It is hard to imagine, everything you have known doesn’t exist anymore. What if the universe didn’t exist? A scenario like this is so vastly inexplicable, indescribable because it is true nothingness. Not lack of matter, but the lack of things that hold matter. Lack of everything. I could imagine it so vividly then. But I can’t now. Even with my hundreds of frustrating attempts to imagine true nothingness, I’m not able to. And that’s what I want to achieve. Welcome to the second phase of Philosophysics. The uncharted depths of philosophy, the backbone of modern physics.

Welcome, to the universe and nothing.

The Standard Model (Primer)

14:51

The standard model of Particle physics by CERN is a worldwide accepted model of the structuring of an atom, and its sub-atomic particles. This is the model that explains phenomenon from the burning of stars to the 3 states of matter.

Initially, atoms were thought to be the smallest units of matter. Later 3 sub-atomic particles, protons, neutron and electrons were discovered, and all atoms were made of this.

In the 1940s, hundreds more of these subatomic particles were found through experiments with the particle accelerator. This needed some organisation. These particles then began to be categorized into the following types

NOTE: Particle decay is the spontaneous process of one elementary particle transforming into other elementary particles. During this process, an elementary particle becomes a different particle with less mass and an intermediate particle such as W boson in muon decay.

Quarks

In the 1960s, physicists realized that protons and neutrons are further made of ‘quarks’ these quarks are of 6 kinds, up, down, bottom, top, strange and charm. Their properties include electric charge, mass colour and spin. They form composite particles called hadrons the most stable of which are protons and neutrons.

The quarks are: up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm.

Up, charm and top quarks have a charge of +2⁄3, while down, strange and bottom quarks have a charge of -1⁄3. Each quark has a matching antiquark. Antiquarks have a charge opposite to that of their quarks.

Up and down quarks are found inside protons and neutrons. Since they have a relatively lower mass, they are normally not subject to particle decay, and can be found easily. They are the most common quarks. They are held together by bosons called gluons. Two up quarks and one down make a proton (2⁄3 + 2⁄3 - 1⁄3 = +1 charge) while two down quarks and one up make a neutron (2⁄3 - 1⁄3 - 1⁄3 = 0 charge). The other four flavours are not seen naturally on Earth, but they can be made in particle accelerators. Some of them may also exist inside of stars.

Below: diagram of proton and a neutron

Top and bottom quarks are the heaviest and second heaviest elementary particles. The top quark interacts primarily by the strong interaction, but can only decay through the weak force. It decays to a W boson and either a bottom quark (most frequently), a strange quark or, on the rarest of occasions, a down quark. Although bottom quarks are not very common, they are found in particles such as B mesons, among others. All bottom quarks will decay into charm quarks or up quarks

Charm and strange quarks are the third and fourth heaviest quarks. They are found in hadrons such as J/ψ meson (J/ψ), D mesons (D), charmed Sigma baryons (Σc). Example of hadrons containing strange quarks include kaons (K), strange D mesons (Ds), Sigma baryons (Σ), and other strange particles.

Leptons

There are 6 kinds of leptons. They may or may not have a charge. They consist of the electron, the muon, the tau (charged); the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino, and the tau neutrino (uncharged). They can be classified into electronic leptons, muonic and tauonic leptons. Since the electron is much lighter than the other charged particles, the muon and the tau rapidly decay into electrons.

Electrons are the most common and most stable charged leptons, and they occur in every atom. They fundamentally govern all chemical reactions, along with being responsible for the transfer of charges. They are negatively charged.

Muons are not stable, and 200 times heavier than an electron, and so is not known to exist in the free state. They rapidly decay into electrons. It was the second lepton to be discovered and are created in particle accelerators.

Taus have properties similar to those of electrons but are much heavier. They are the only leptons that have the sufficient mass to decay into hadrons.

Neutrinos are neutral leptons that are not affected by the electromagnetic force, that are only affected by the weak force. They are created by certain types of radioactive decay, when cosmic rays hit atoms, in nuclear reactions near the sun and many more. They are of 3 kinds, electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos.

Bosons

Bosons are a class of subatomic particles. They are a category of subatomic particles divided on the basis of spin. Particles with half-integer spin are called fermions, and those with a full integer spin are called bosons. The name was coined by Paul Dirac, after the Physicists, Satyendra Nath Bose.

Satyendra Nath Bose

The 5 main Bosons are W, Z, gluon, photon, Higgs and the proposed but not included graviton.

Bosons are classified into gauge and scalar. Gauge bosons are force governing bosons. Photons, Z, W and gluons are gauge bosons. There is only one scalar boson, the Higgs boson. See fundamental forces.

The gluon governs the strong force and keeps the up and down quarks attached in the neutron and proton, and the neutron and proton in the nucleus. Without this, the protons in the nucleus would repel each other, and the matter would not exist.

The photon governs the electromagnetic force.

The W and Z govern the weak force. Without them, particle decay would not occur.

The Higgs gives mass to all the other particles. As of march 28^th 2015 at 14:11 PM IST, the Higgs Boson is the latest boson to be discovered and is often called the single biggest discovery in modern science.

The graviton is a hypothetical boson that governs gravity. The standard model, as well as general relativity, allow a particle as this to exist, although its existence is not scientifically proven yet. Therefore, gravity is not a part of the standard model. It was a major part of the plot of the 2014 Hollywood feature film Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’ which uses gravitons to communicate across interstellar distances and through Einstein-Rosen bridges.

The standard model is a widely accepted model of the inner workings of the universe. Our understanding of the universe has evolved from the four elements of air, water, soil and fire to the modern model of Quantum mechanics, in just a few hundred years. These advancements are milestones of human achievement, and reminders that we are incredible creatures, who have never rested with even 99.99% of an answer, and are always, asking questions, and learning. Although these achievements and the kind of money spent on research may seem in vain, I believe that they are uniting factors as they define the humans as a race. I would like to conclude by quoting Erwin Schrodinger,

“Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe.”

Fin.

Why the egg came first: On the origin of species.

18:38

Evolution is a weird puzzling thing. Looking at examples of evolution is so infinitely counter-intuitive, it is impossible to settle. Every time I hear something in biology class, like 'cacti have leaves in the shape of thorns to prevent water loss', I am perplexed. How does that comply in any conceivable respect? Prevention of transpiration is not the reason for this adaptation, it is an advantage.

Or is it?

It is inexplicable, why evolution and adaptations are not taught this way in our education system, it is straightforward, simple, and makes satisfying intuitive sense. Take the example of developing eyes. Early aquatic animals had no eyes, no form of visual connect, the term 'see' was meaningless. So did they just wake up one day with eyes? Well, strangely enough, yeah. They did. Imagine a tiny sightless organism swimming in the water, swimming away from predators it could barely see. A genetic mutation occurs, an offspring is born with a light-sensitive protein on the front, unlikely but brilliant, so wild a cloak and dagger, and now, that one organism has a higher chance of being able to survive in the savage ocean. A higher chance of reproducing offsprings with the same hereditary protein, which once agin has a higher survival chance than its blind mates. Slowly, the population of the not blind organism prevail, and an evolutionary phase is brought to an end.

The chicken as we know it is a flightless biped, which had one significant selective advantage over its evolutionary predecessor. This advantage was created in one embryo inside of an egg, which began the grand paradigm shift of not chicken, to chicken. Hence, the egg, did, in fact, come first. We will never talk about this again. Ever.

So there, this is why we are not apes (biologists will get this joke).

Another thing. I grew up wondering whether we humans will ever evolve anymore. Since all of the factors that take our lives before we can reproduce are insurmountable (aside perhaps disease), this should mean we are evolutionary pinnacles, or that we will never evolve anymore. Well, at least not naturally.

I'm Daksh Gupta, and as always, never stop asking questions.