Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

This is super naive but I just think of it as you (or whatever other particle is interacting with the one of interest) have now become part of its system. Like a causal event cone reaching you. Nothing about the particle changed, just your relationship with it (hence locking down the uncertain parameters).

I'm sure you or another physicist could point out the flaws in my mental model.

Coroutines are most easily understood as a way to write a state machine in a way that looks like a function. I.e., it's just a notational trick to make one function do different things according to when it's called.

To see it, imagine you have a struct with a data member for each local variable of your function, and replace your function with a member function that has no local variables, but uses "this" to get at what was local data.

Add one more data member, a number that is set differently right before each place the function returns.

Finally, insert some code at the start of the function that, according to the number, jumps to just after the last return statement executed.

Then, each time you call the function, what happens depends on what happened last time.

There are more details, but that is the gist.

You can write that yourself in C++98, with the body of the function inside a switch statement. Getting it past code review would be the real challenge.

From a physics perspective I bet you have two things happening:

1. These molecules are moving around a lot. The kinetic energy of molecules at room or body temperature gives them impressive velocity relative to their scale, and they're also rotating altogether and internally.

2. Compatible molecules are like magnetic keys and locks. They attract each other and the forces align with meeting points. The same way that proteins fold spontaneously.

So the remaining part is getting concentrations appropriate for what you want to happen - and that's a matter of signaling molecules and "automatic" cell responses to changes in equilibrium. It's a really chaotic system and it's a wonder it works at all.

I imagine that's also one reason life is imprecise, i.e. no two individuals are alike even with identical genes. There's a lot of extra "entropy" introduced by that mess of a soup.

Information is actually about _reduction_ in entropy. Roughly speaking, entropy measures the amount of uncertainty about some event you might try to predict. Now, if you observe some new fact that has high (mutual) information with the event, it means the new fact has significantly reduced your uncertainty about the outcome of the event. In this sense, entropy measures the maximum amount of information you could possibly learn about the outcome to some uncertain event. An interesting corollary here is that the entropy of an event also puts an upper bound on the amount of information it can convey about _any_ other event.

I think one frequent source of confusion is the difference between "randomness" and "uncertainty" in colloquial versus formal usage. Entropy and randomness in the formal sense don't have a strong connotation that the uncertainty is intrinsic and irreducible. In the colloquial sense, I feel like there's often an implication that the uncertainty can't be avoided.