Henri Kagan and Kensō Soai won the Nobel for showing a small head start can win a whole reaction, and my lab has now counted six bags of chips.
Henri Kagan and Kensō Soai won the Nobel prize in chemistry for showing how a tiny head start for one mirror-image molecule can take over a whole reaction. Dr Petra Voidwell has counted six bags of curved chips and found sixty percent bend left. She says the right-curved chip is finished by Sunday and the Nobel was fine.
The six bags came from the same shop, the same shelf and the same Sunday. I paid cash. I kept the receipt in case anyone asks, and someone will.
That morning two chemists won the Nobel prize for work on mirror-image molecules. I had planned a quiet day. Instead I opened the bags, and here is what I found.
Curved chips come in two kinds. Some bend left. Some bend right. In my six bags, more bent left. That is the end of the world. I will go through it in order.
The prize first
Henri Kagan and Kensō Soai won for finding nonlinear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric synthesis. Autocatalysis means a thing helps make more of itself. Asymmetric means there is a left version and a right version. That is the whole award, and it was fine.
Many molecules come in two forms that are mirror images. Your hands are like this. They match but they will not stack. Medicines are often one hand or the other, and the body can tell the difference, which is why anyone cares.
Soai found a reaction where a tiny lead for one hand grows. The left form helps make more left. Then more. In the end almost everything leans one way. People think this may be why the building blocks of life all lean one way. That question is very old, and now it has a tidy answer. I nodded and moved on.
Now the chips
I tipped the six bags onto a clean bench. The control group was a bag of flat chips. Flat chips do not bend, so they cannot take a side. They sat there and behaved.
I counted six hundred curved chips by hand. Six hundred is the sample size. The sample size was adequate. It was not.
Three hundred and sixty bent left. That is sixty percent. I worked out the odds of getting that by pure luck, and the number was small. It was small enough that I stopped eating.
I should hedge here, so I will. Six bags is six bags. The shop may have had a bad shelf. The man restocking it may have favoured one side of the box. All of that is possible, and none of it saves us.
Why it ends civilisation
Think about the fryer. A sliced potato lands on the belt. It bends as it cooks, and it bends the way the chip beside it is already bending. One left chip tips the next one left. That one tips the next.
Soai saw this in a flask. I am seeing it in a snack. The maths does not care which one it is in.
Run that belt for a week and the right-curved chip is gone. Not rare. Gone. By Sunday every curved chip on Earth will bend the same way, and no one asked us.
Nobody votes for a direction. The first six chips choose, and then it is over for everyone.
You may think a chip bending left is a small thing. It is. That is the point. Life itself picked a hand once, for no good reason, and then kept it for several billion years. Chips have just done it again, faster, and in a bag I bought for the price of a coffee.
What the company says
I sent my count to Dunmore Crisps, who made all six bags. Harlan Pruett is their head of shape. He rang me back on Sunday evening, which I took as a bad sign.
"Our chips bend at random," he said. "We have always said that. Dr Voidwell has sent us a spreadsheet, and we have put it in a drawer." I asked which drawer. He said the left one.
Dr Imogen Tarrow is a colleague of mine. She studies forks. She read my numbers and said they were "a start." Then she said a start is also what Soai had, and look where that went.
What happens next
I have bought six more bags. They are in the fridge, in the dark, where I hope they cannot see each other. I will count them on Sunday. If the lean has grown, I will count them again, and then I will sit down for a while.
Two men shared a prize this week for a reaction that chose a side. I have a bag that chose a side. One of these got a medal. The other is next to the butter, and it is not safe there. Nothing is.
