Tick Talk

Can you flip a coin so it will land heads up one hundred times in a row? I can. I'll tell you how at the end.

But first the watchmaker argument for the existence of God. I'm sure you have heard this argument. You are walking through the desert one day and you see a watch lying on a rock. You would have to assume it was created by a watchmaker. You would never assume, in fact couldn't assume, that it just happened to be created randomly from particles and elements just zooming around that happened to join together in the form of a watch. Perhaps if you lived in another universe you could, but in this universe where you are constantly observing the physical laws in action, where they are the very fiber of your understanding of how the world works, you wouldn't.

Another example has you walking through the woods one day and seeing a pile of bricks. You walk by the next day and the bricks have gone from being a pile to being a nice little house. Is it possible that all of this order could have randomly arisen without some sentient design or organizing principle behind it? The law of entropy, also known as the second law of thermodynamics, says no. Those who argue this as proof of "intelligent design" say no.

If you open a bottle of perfume in a room it will dissipate to fill the room. This maximizes the entropy and leads to maximum disorder. Would you ever expect it to "randomly" collect in the open bottle? My desk becomes more and more cluttered until I spend a large amount of time and energy re-ordering it. Perhaps if I worked for millions of years it could randomly be ordered, but I'm not holding my breath.

Everywhere I look I can see examples of the universe tending towards disorder. Everywhere. That is why they call it the second LAW of thermodynamics. Not the second it usually happens this way of thermodynamics. I have never once seen anything that I would describe as defying this law. Even incredible odds of things can happen randomly, but they don't happen in consistent manner over long periods of time to defy the law of entropy.

Suppose you have a thousand pennies in a jar on a day you are really bored. Using your thumb, you flip the first one in the air and it lands on the ground heads up. You flip another and are amazed that it landed heads up on top of the other penny. Suppose you did this every hour every day for a million years. Would you ever expect that random chance would ever lead to the possibility of landing even 100 of those pennies on top of each other?

My experience of the world around me leads me to believe in the watchmaker argument. I think there must be something intelligent behind the design of the universe. Too many random things had to happen over too long a period of time in a definite direction (towards order, not disorder) for me to believe otherwise. This is just another circumstance that I chalk up in the God column.

God 2, No God 0

Now, how to flip a coin heads up one hundred times in a row. All you need is a big box and a large number of coins.

If you put 50 coins in a box and flipped them, you would expect 25 of them to be heads. Put those into the box and flip them again, getting ~12 coins. Flip them again, getting about six. Flip again getting about three. Flip again you'll probably get one. That is a coin that has landed on heads five times in a row. To get a coin to land heads up 100 times you just need 2^100 coins. I'd throw in a few more because random means not every flip will be exactly evenly divided. Put those coins in a BIG box and start flipping. (Thanks to Mr. Twitchell, my high school physics teacher.)

Next: How many constants would a constant maker make if a constant maker constantly made constants?