Saturday 25 February 2006

Inevitable Impossibilities

Today someone told me the 'true' story of how they accidentally killed a robin which flew under their foot as they were walking in London, and it was squashed flat by their boot! I joked about how the probability of this happening was near zero, that it falls into the category of 'impossible', but it happened.

This reminds me of some of artist Keith Tyson’s playful works which explore the intuitive difficulties encountered when thinking about the worlds of chance, probability, fate and freewill. Some of his very unlikely ('impossible') exhibits point to the fact that every moment involves a completely unique arrangement of atoms in space and time (leaving Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle aside) with a probability of occurrence of near zero, and yet they're happening all the time. A nice idea perhaps to compile a list of both true and made up 'impossible' events.

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