Dear All
A standard-issue big city all-glass high-rise stands across the street from my usual bus stop. When I look up the high-rise facade, I can see the reflections of the near-by buildings and the white clouds from the sky above. Even when everything else looks pretty much the same, the reflections of the clouds are different, hour to hour and day to day.
After I boarded the bus, I rushed to get a single seat facing four others on a slightly elevated platorm. From my vantage point, I can't help noticing the shoes of the four passengers across from my seat are not the same, by either the make , the design, or the style, and that is true even when the four passengers happen to be members of the same family.
I could change the objects of my fascination from shoes to something else, to buttons on the dresses for example, but I do not think the result would have been any different. Diversity or Uniqueness would still rule the day! (There is a delightful essay on the subject of uniqueness by Joe Fisher in this contest.)
I am pretty sure people are fascinated by the diversity and the uniqueness in the world, when the other side of it is the inevitable boredom of sameness every time.
However, we have a need to know where all this beautiful and enchanting diversity comes from. Borrowing Wheelerian phraseology of "How come the quantum?", I ask "How come the diversity?" A standard physics answer is "Entropy always increases." (I am not a physicist, and I don't know if that is the final answer.)
Whenever I'm out of my depth, I go back to my theory of everything (TOE), which is a mental brew of common sense, intuition, gut, analogy, judgement, etc. etc. , buttressed when I can with a little thought-experiment.
The thought-experiment is simple. Imagine cutting a circle into two precisely, identical, and equal parts. Practically, there is no way we can get the desired result, because one part will be bigger or smaller in some way.
Physics - especially quantum physics - says it don't matter, do the superposition!
But superposition is fictive, an invention like the Macarena dance, and it has given us a cat, alive and dead at the same time.
I have heard that angels can dance on the tip of the needle, and now I'm finding out some of us can too!
Cheers and Good Luck to All,
Than Tin