“You mentioned that before. So, what is parsimony?”
“I’m glad you asked, Zachary. Parsimony is an extreme unwillingness to use resources. Remember how cheap we were when we were poor, starving teenage entrepreneurs?”
Zac sighed. “I do. Dollars would stretch like spacetime.”
“Exactly! We were very efficient with what we had, and that’s exactly how the universe works. Actually, here’s a quote from a New York Times article that stood out to me.” I began reading from my phone.
Photoreceptors exemplify the principle of optimization, an idea, gaining ever wider traction among researchers, that certain key features of the natural world have been honed by evolution to the highest possible peaks of performance, the legal limits of what Newton, Maxwell, Pauli, Planck et Albert will allow.
The New York Times
I paused for a second. “You know Newton, Maxwell, Planck and the other dudes are all physicists, right? They are responsible for discovering the laws of physics.”
Zac nodded, and I continued.
Scientists have identified and mathematically anatomized an array of cases where optimization has left its fastidious mark, among them the superb efficiency with which bacterial cells will close in on a food source; the precision response in a fruit fly embryo to contouring molecules that help distinguish tail from head; and the way a shark can find its prey by measuring micro-fluxes of electricity in the water a tremulous millionth of a volt strong — which, as Douglas Fields observed in Scientific American, is like detecting an electrical field generated by a standard AA battery "with one pole dipped in the Long Island Sound and the other pole in waters of Jacksonville, Fla." In each instance, biophysicists have calculated, the system couldn’t get faster, more sensitive or more efficient without first relocating to an alternate universe with alternate physical constants.
The New York Times
I stopped reading and looked at Zac, who had half-finished eating my mango.
“Were you just listening?” I asked.
“Yes, I was!” he exclaimed while wiping mango juice from his chin. “I am an excellent listener. You were basically pointing out how finely tuned nature is, and how it couldn’t get more efficient without first relocating to another universe with different physical laws.”
“Gold star for you!” I pat him on the head. “That’s what I mean by parsimony. Nature is efficient. It will always take the path of least resistance. This is called the ‘principle of least action’ in physics. Now, let’s go back to Freddy the snail.”
