Cosmic Rays May Explain Life’s Bias for Right-Handed DNA

So when a cosmic-ray particle strikes a DNA strand and causes a mutation, some of its counterparts in other universes are missing their copies of the DNA strand altogether, while others are striking it at different positions, and hence causing different mutations. Thus a single cosmic-ray strike on a single DNA molecule will in general cause a larg

has to do with preferential breakdown of one of the two enantiomers due to circularly polarized light.

The common element was randomness, Chaitin suddenly thought. Shannon linked randomness, perversely, to information. Physicists had found randomness inside the atom—the kind of randomness that Einstein deplored by complaining about God and dice. All these heroes of science were talking about or around randomness.

Israeli physicist named Yakir Aharonov basically agreed with Einstein about God not playing dice, and he proposed that the future is the hidden variable underlying quantum strangeness. Individual particles, such as those photons passing through the slits of the double-slit experiment, are actually influenced by what will happen to them next (i.e.,

In other histories, one of those cosmic-ray particles will strike a human cell, damaging some already damaged DNA in such a way as to make the cell cancerous. Some non-negligible proportion of all cancers are caused in this way. As a result, there exist histories in which any given person, alive in our history at any time, is killed soon afterwards