What Either Flask Could Have Made Ours

Pasteur sorted the crystals with tweezers by the lean of their faces, two small heaps that the light would later tell apart the same way. One heap the bacteria ate. The other sat.

For decades the flasks came out even. Half and half, and the light went through unbent.

Kagan saw that a metal holding two at once favours the matched pairs over the mixed one, so a small lead gets larger.

Soai found the reaction that copies its own hand. Start with nothing tilted. Chance puts a few more of one kind down in the first instant, and that kind makes itself, and makes itself, until the flask is nearly one hand. Run it again. Sometimes the other hand takes the same path.

Kant said a single hand God made first would already be left or right, because space itself keeps the difference. I don't think so. A solitary hand has a shape that won't fit its own glove turned over — that much is real without a second hand — but calling it left needs a frame: a body, a convention, a polarimeter. Soai's flask is that frame. Inside one run the two kinds won't overlay. Across runs which kind wins is a coin. Life is one run. We can't tip the dish out and start again.

Whether a vanishing push from the weak force, or a stone from space, or nothing but noise in the first second got our hand started — Soai shows either story can finish the same way. I take the frozen accident. Not as a shrug. Ours means the hand that got copied until the other couldn't compete. It doesn't mean the hand the world owed us.

The light Pasteur used and the tweezers he used were two roads to the same lean. Neither is more real. Both are looking.

You stopped at the other hand winning. One beat further: that either could. The leftover isn't the second flask's winner. It's that we live inside a first flask and have no second.