| How to things that are so small and so limited in
variety, such as quarks, protons, electrons,
neutrons, and nucleotides, make up things that are
so complicated and completely different, like
elements and DNA? |
Answer 1:
First I want to say this is a good question. It
is really amazing that things can grow from small
atoms to element or even more complex DNA or
molecules. I think they can be understood in two
key principles:
1) You have some varieties of basic elements
2) There are other degrees of freedom for upper
level combination
To illustrate, one good related example is
why do we have more than 100 different elements
on earth while all of them are simply made of
neutrons, protons and electrons. To apply the
two above mentioned principles in this case:
firstly we have neutrons, protons and electrons
as the basic elements to form the atoms;
secondly to make an atom, we have the freedom
to choose different numbers of neutrons, protons
and electrons. A different combination of
those particles can make a different chemical
element. Using only one proton and one
electron we can make a Hydrogen atom. Using
8 protons, 8 neutrons and 8 electrons we can make
an Oxygen atom. That's why we have more
than 100 elements while all of them are simply
made of three particles.
One step further, now we have more than 100
elements, a combination of different numbers of
chemical elements would make millions of different
chemicals in our daily life. It could be as
simple as a water molecule (two H and one
O), or as complex as a DNA. Here I want to
emphasize, other than the numbers of elements we
can choose, there is one more degree of freedom:
how do we arrange them in space. Using the
carbon atoms only, we can make carbon, diamond,
graphene and more. The key is when we consider
other degrees of freedom, things can get complex.
One more good example is that the English word
that we are using. There are simply only 26
letters running from A to Z. By using a different
combination of different numbers of letters and
put them in different order (for instance: IP vs
PI), we can have a infinite number of words in
principle. Not all of them are meaningful to us,
but still we have more than 1 million words in
English (Maybe only 10 thousand in our daily
life). One step further, by making a combination
of words we can make a sentence. Even more, we can
have paragraphs, chapters, articles, books etc.,
from words. That's how things are getting more
and more complex if we add some other degrees of
freedom.
Best,
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