Tangled Headphones are a “Post”-requisite for Life

It seems as if there is some law of the physical universe that if you leave a pair of wired earbuds in a pocket and give it a good jostle, you’re bound to find more knots and tangles in it than Rapunzel’s bed head. Thankfully we have scientists to confirm for us that wires do naturally tangle themselves into complicated patterns if left in an enclosed space, no matter how they are put away. While I’m sure most people would groan when they pull out their rat’s nest of earbuds (if they have wires in the first place), I would make the claim that without this natural tendency, biological life would not been a thing in the universe.

         Here’s how I see it:

         Life started as a jumble of molecules in the ocean, haphazardly connected to each other by regular physical bonds that you may remember from Chemistry in high school: Ionic, Covalent, and Metallic, but since we are dealing with organic matter, we only need Ionic and Covalent. So, here we have two simple “strings” of molecules being push and pulled around by the currents and hot gases escaping from the crust at the bottom of the ocean, interacting with each other. Sounds oddly similar to earbuds in a bag. Albeit, the ocean is a much larger bag. I mean, just look at DNA, the blueprints for life, which we didn’t even know what they looked like until 69 years ago... Kind of looks like two wires lazily wrapped around each other with lots of knots in-between.

         Look at the “birth” of the universe itself. The background radiation that we can see from the Big Bang shows uneven spots all over. [Which is also where the static on old, tube televisions came from, 14 billion years later]. Even though there was literally nothing in the way, (not even empty space) it was still “tangled” and “knotted” all over. If the universe was completely uniform and even as it expanded from the Big Bang (more of an expansion than a bang, but hey, alliteration) then gravity would have kept everything in place, with everything pulling on everything else completely equally. One atom was just that much closer to another that it allowed gravity to ever-so slightly pull and start a chain reaction that would lead to the first stars.

        So yeah, please think about going back to old “retro” wired headphones, and when you pull them out all tangled, don’t groan, but smile at the complexity of chaos.