brryoink... I want to respond in greater depth, but for the moment, I will just kick myself and remind myself to read The Elegant Universe and recommend to you In Search of Schrödinger's Cat by John Gribbin.
I read an Asimov speculative (but not sf) essay once about what would happen to a being like us with predominantly left-handed chemistry if plonked down in an environment where all around him was right-handed. If I remember correctly (and it's been years and years, I'm afraid), he agreed with what seems intuitively correct--that said being would be happy and healthy and internally consistent and breathing just fine... until it tried to eat. And then it would wonder why it was starving to death while eating turkey dinners. Basically, if we were mirror-imaged, and the handedness of everything in our bodies that has handedness was switched, it would all still work with itself, and the only outside molecules that we encounter that are complex enough to be handed are those we metabolize... Ok, so I don't think that actually told you anything new, but... maybe I could find the essay again. It was in one of the oodles of little paperback collections of science essays that he's published.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2004-07-27 08:45 pm (UTC)I read an Asimov speculative (but not sf) essay once about what would happen to a being like us with predominantly left-handed chemistry if plonked down in an environment where all around him was right-handed. If I remember correctly (and it's been years and years, I'm afraid), he agreed with what seems intuitively correct--that said being would be happy and healthy and internally consistent and breathing just fine... until it tried to eat. And then it would wonder why it was starving to death while eating turkey dinners. Basically, if we were mirror-imaged, and the handedness of everything in our bodies that has handedness was switched, it would all still work with itself, and the only outside molecules that we encounter that are complex enough to be handed are those we metabolize...
Ok, so I don't think that actually told you anything new, but... maybe I could find the essay again. It was in one of the oodles of little paperback collections of science essays that he's published.