The Magic Flute

Yes I think it's the same with music score reading, for the piano your eye is reading two staves and your brain is converting the relative positions of the black notes to your hands, and as your hands are in a "well known position" it all works. If you don't know which position your hands are in on the keyboard to start with then it all falls apart. Which means it is patterns.

What would result in a more dramatic upheaval in our universe, were you to wave a magic wand and affect the change instantly:

1. The elimination of the element carbon?
2. The inability of hydrogen to bond to oxygen?

Hmm, interesting question. Very.

1) No carbon anymore. Well we are carbon based so no more humans, we'd all spontaneously combust I suppose. Carbon is a key element in the nuclear chain in stars, so without it stars would burn out quicker. In fact, all elements after carbon are based on the fact that there is stable carbon so the Universe would quickly revert to elements that are lighter than carbon - like removing the base card of a house of cards. So according to the Periodic Table that is stuck on my wall that is Hydrogen (1), Helium (4), Lithium (6.9), Beryllium (9) and Boron (10.8), the only ones that have a lower atomic weight than carbon (12 in it's non-isotopic natural form). A pretty boring Universe then.

2) No more water. Well the DNA molecule would immediately collapse - I loved the part of the BBC drama documentary "Life Story" where upon seeing the erroneous structure for DNA posited by Linus Pauling (the American quantum chemist and biologist), Francis Crick (the English physicist and molecular biologist) said "but where's the water??" There is a lot of water in DNA. So all humans would turn to pillars of salt immediately.

Note: History shows that the structure of DNA was basically discovered in the work of a woman, Rosalind Franklin. James Watson (an American) basically ripped her numbers off of some a Bragg plane diffraction slide of DNA and passed them on to Crick. They then intuited the double-helix structure with matching base pairs, using the dimensions for the molecule obtained through Rosalinds work, by trial and error. During this time, Rosalind was taking the data and doing a statistical Monte Carlo analysis on it (which took months in those days) and Watson & Crick basically innovated. Rosalind has always been my one of my heroines since I first came across her in the 1980's - you need people like Rosalind to succeed. Dot the i's and cross the t's types.

So what are your thoughts on the questions you pose?

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Sorry I have not been very active lately, I've had Katherine for at least 10 nights in a row now, her mother seems to have more important matters to attend to ! I am just about managing to keep my clients happy - and my daughter and I are getting on really well.

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And sir, should you really be discussing your wife's complex "flute trills" in a public forum !