ABSTRACT
Mind you, it didn’t help that Humpty was an egg. But even if Humpty had not had the handicap of a fragile external shell, his disintegration would have been difficult to reverse. All living and physical systems sustain coherence only so long as the forces that hold them together are stronger than those that would pull them apart. But when we consider how well we understand such processes of coherence and disintegration, there is a remarkable asymmetry. A friend once used to sign off his emails with the proverb: “Life is what stops when you stomp on it.” Put differently, we know how to break an egg, but not how to make one. An unbroken egg is-well-just an egg. It is as though we take it for granted that the world consists of ready-made and complete objects and creatures, and regard any change from this state of affairs as a form of deviation. It’s not just that we can’t see molecules, electromagnetic fields, DNA, or the formation of chemical compounds; it’s rather that it seems unnatural even to think of objects that way, unless we have been specially educated to do so.
