"Now, most single accidents make very little difference to the future, but others may have widespread ramifications, many diverse consequences all traceable to one chance event that could have turned out differently. Those we call frozen accidents. I give as an example the right-handed character of some of the molecules that play important roles in all life on Earth though the corresponding left-handed ones do not. People tried for a long time to explain this phenomenon by invoking the left- handedness of the weak interaction for matter as opposed to antimatter, but they concluded that such an explanation wouldn't work. Let's suppose that this conclusion is correct and that the right-handedness of the biological molecules is purely an accident. Then the ancestral organism from which all life on this planet is descended happened to have right-handed molecules, and life could perfectly well have come out the other way, with left- handed molecules playing the important roles."

"Another example can be chosen from human history. For instance, Henry VIII became king of England because his older brother Arthur died. From the accident of that death flowed all the coins, all the charters, all the other records, all the history books mentioning Henry VIII; all the different events of his reign, including the manner of separation of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church; and of course the whole succession of subsequent monarchs of England and of Great Britain, to say nothing of the antics of Charles and Diana. The accumulation of frozen accidents is what gives the world its effective complexity."

Quoted at length from : Murray Gell-Mann. Full interview at http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/zc-Ch.19.html

Very nice statement of position.

Twistors of course have chirality built in to the maths from the word go. (He thinks, he's pretty sure in fact.) So if a GUT based on twistor theory turned out to be verified by experiment would that make the right-handedness more or less accidental to your mind?

Richard, I have no idea and I will almost certainly never have the time or the math to find out. I doubt they had much direct influence on the medieval English succession though. --Tom Ayerst

No indeed, and this wasn't a quibble. History is frighteningly one-way. There is so much that sure looks like accident to you and me. In Open Theism we're much more open to that being the final truth of some of these events, as is true (I presume) for all events in your worldview, by the way. Otherwise we end up Hearing Zosia saying that a little girl's eyes being torn out by brutal and laughing soldiers is somehow "for the best" and all that kind of rubbish.

No, my question is a reasonably deep metaphysical one but needs no advanced maths. If the right-handedness turned out to be built into the maths would it still be considered accidental? Careful how you answer. But this is not a trap either. It's a genuinely interesting question, for teasing apart two kinds of worldview, way before adopting something like the god of Islam or Judaism. At least I think.

I'm going to avoid the maths bit (I am confused by the relationship between maths and physics and I suspect I am not alone in this). If there is a lower level factor that predisposes a higher level system then the effect on the higher level system wouldn't be considered an accident (but the lower level factor might itself be an accident).

It is a Human Construct Frozen Accident that the British drive on the left. It is an evolutionary Frozen Accident that we have two legs (there is no reason, as far as I know) that the bodyplan of our ancestors should not have had 6 limbs leaving us with four legs and two arms. It is not a Human Construct Frozen Accident that tailors don't make trousers with four legs.

As for Isomers and chirality. I believe that most chiral molecules produces their isomers in equal proportions during an isolated chemical reaction. This suggests that the preponderance of left handed proteins is down to a historical chance event (but I may be wrong) -- ta

Thanks for the answer, which makes me realise that I didn't read the Gell-Mann carefully enough. The chirality of isomers ain't what I'm concerned with at all - unless it turns out to be linked after all with the lack of symmetry "lower down" (as seems unlikely to Gell-Mann), where matter triumphs over anti-matter by such a huge margin statistically, making this conversation and a few other things like the history of the human race, with all its accidents, possible!

I can't make you say it and you have been very careful above not to say it. But as you are well aware there is a step where one says "the laws were and are not accidental, they were either designed or are essential in some deep way, not dependent on anything else". In this case a verified GUT based on twistors explaning chirality would potentially take chirality from category accidental to non-accidental for some people. I think that's pretty strange and worth thinking about. Certainly part of Roger Penrose's motivation, as I understand it, has been to remove arbitrariness and replace with intelligibility, with something at least he sees as much more solid. Penrose meantime seems to remain quite open on what he calls The God Question.

However it was the step "the laws were and are not accidental" that I was wondering about. There's no proof on this kind of thing of course. For some of us, having considered how Unexpected, Beautiful, Sophisticated And Fruitful the underlying maths is, the step "the laws are not accidental" seems compelling. The idea of design pops up on the horizon at that this point, of course, and that scares some people, of course. But, as I've tried to indicate, "the laws are the result of a designer" is quite a separate step. The attitude on the prior step depends I guess how much one wants to firewall against ever having to consider the possibility of this known-to-be ridiculous and ruinous step!

The Concept/Referent of Frozen Accidents is a very useful one for Why, thanks Tom Ayerst. It raises two more difficult questions

• whether all events are equally Frozen Accidents
• what attitude we (as reasonably philosophically literate) should take to the reaction of the mass of ordinary human beings as they seek to explain/tell stories about events that happen in their lives. A cool example from Romania that I came across the same day that Tom put this page up is described in Accident And Emergency. Some would say that even that minor coincidence on the Net/in the UK might have some meaning. But let's look at the event in Romania, which has the benefit of distance from us and no overarching explanation given at all, by any of the parties.