The goal of course is to make it more interesting and/or ripe for adventure. So what would you change about Earth's characteristics or the underlying physics of our universe?

Here's another way to think about it: which of these constants…

braeunig.us

…would you change?

This is difficult for me. When I think of gravity changing, for instance, I imagine the moon flying away, or immediately crashing into the Earth, or the moon's gravity having a completely different effect on the Tide.

But I suppose I would like the sea level to be a little lower, so that NYC would last a few decades longer than it will otherwise.

Mars and the Moon are switched. The 4th planet--what we call the moon--is a small body hard to find in the sky because it's so far away.

But Mars, on the other hand, looms in the sky. A double-planetary system that gives the Earth massive tides.

Also, it's not red anymore. Perhaps there was some exchange of atmospheres because they are so close? Stray bacteria and other single-cell life reached Mars millions of years ago from the Earth ... Because it's closer, it's warmer, and there is water on Mars that's not just in the form of ice.

But like our old moon, it's locked in place, where only one side of it faces Earth.

A change in the rotation/revolution of the earth which would make the days-years shorter/longer.

What if all of the plantes in our solar system where much closer to each other? That would change A LOT on Earth, wouldn't it. It would make it possible to visit more planets, and learn more.

And I've always wondered how it would be to look at the stars, and be able to see just more than a little dot of a light. That was just my rambling thoughts, anyway:)

Quick note: when we mess with fundamental constants though, we're likely going to bump up against the Anthropic Principle (and likely eliminate the possibility of humans).

writers, and people were given comma quotas....

This morning, I'm thinking about things which would change the way we build: buildings, cities, roads, etc.

What if we had a radically different material or method for the structural supports of buildings, making it economical to build higher, faster? How would that change the shape of cities? We'd need different ways to move people in and out and between buildings, for one, which has consequences to the nature of street-level retail and so on...

@Samuel: True... and I'm okay with that. In fact I'm interested in that border-zone of human hospitality.

P.S. I was reading the Wikipedia article the other day, and the part about the importance of ice density (!) sorta blew my mind:

en.wikipedia.org

Assuming that the physics would take care of themselves, or that we'd have a tzar of constants who was superpowerful and not self-interested and could adjust things as necessary (i.e. the moon would not collide into San Francisco, etc.), then I'd like humans to have a lower gravitational constant than everything else.

This would make us all like John Carter. We could jump/fly many places which would reduce our transportation footprint, and hopefully we'd live longer as a result of our new, more active lifestyles. I also think it would be fun every day, and it would also be something of an equalizer across the world.

Oh, and philosophers would actually have/find the answers to the things they are asking/writing/ about.

I'd make the Earth a bit smaller. Other continents are closer, so they were "discovered" before the technological differences between their inhabitants were too big, and that thing with the South Americans and the flu didn't happen. Everybody can relate to people living in the tropics or polar circle - mostly because everybody IS related to people there. Colonialism would have been different. Power relations between the superstates would be different. I wonder...

@Anna I like that one. The simple power of a scale change…

And if you make the Earth a bit larger, the atmosphere would be thicker, causing humans to perhaps confine themselves to mountain ranges, where the pressure is a bit more "normal".

@Anna and @Robin: a small earth, like Mars, would have less gravitational pull, unless it was denser in the middle to compensate.

The horizon would be closer too. Which would mean that there would be more places where you could actually see the curvature of the Earth. Exploration might have started earlier if people knew that.

Would humans look different?

Making water cling to itself, making it shapable and more portable would help. People could travel farther with it and get it to where it needed to go easier. Solve one of the basic needs of humanity without all those messy buckets.

I wonder if there are physical constants related to air density/pressure that could have affected how humans developed verbal and non-verbal communication methods... Maybe if sound was slower (significantly so? is that possible?), non-verbal signals would have been more important to our evolution.

I have been very concerned about the atrocities that people have committed throughout history; that people can hurt each other as though those other people weren't the same as themselves. I remember reading years ago about research being done to connect people's brains, so that someone who was healthy or happy could transmit feelings of comfort to someone who is sick or depressed. It got me thinking about what if this techology became widely diffused throughout the world? Would people embrace it or ignore it? Would it be used for good or evil? I strongly wish to impart my empathy upon other people who would appear to have none. I think it could be a better world. But then again, people with hate could spread it easier as well...

what if we lived in pangea? en.wikipedia.org
if the continents had never drifted, & every country was connected to the rest by land.

What if the only constant was flux? Maybe I'd finally get around to living in the moment.

I think lengthening or shortening the timespan the most recent glacial period would have some interesting effects, everything from changing the Finger Lakes in Upstate New York to affecting when modern civilization developed.

What if P=NP? en.wikipedia.org

Under an interesting version of this hypothetical, we figure out how to reduce all "hard" computing problems (like cracking encryption) into "easy" computing problems (like encrypting something in the first place).

No more encryption --> Secrets go old school (records aren't secure, so people just have to remember things)

It's trivially easy to figure out the fastest way to deliver a pizza.

So is drug discovery.

How about playing with biological constants? The speed of evolution/rate of mutation? The intelligence of animals? More/less biodiversity (related to the size of the planet and the land mass ratio.)

I'd like to monkey around with the speed of light in a vacuum, C. Turn it up a little, say, so that the energy derived from the sun's fusion was a little more, and we could see farther into past universe.

Or even better, make it many orders of magnitude higher, so that near-instantaneous communication between stars is possible; this would assume a decoupling of it from the mass/energy duality; maybe make it dependent on the speed of gravity, instead?

Or maybe a universe that was simply higher-energied, with the attendant ability to shape it. If C were on the order of 10^100, there'd be enough energy in the universe to make wormholes, exotic matter, and all sorts of other things possible.

I love this question, but can't help but think of how we're already tweaking Earth with climate change. For a book (assuming that is what this is about), I'd love to see someone explore what the long-term affects of higher levels of carbon would have on evolution. Would humans or other animals exposed to an atmosphere higher in carbon, for example, become larger as the dinosaurs did?

What if there were different places on earth where different rules applied? For example: the fruit of the tree would create different gravitational reactions. Or there is a special place on earth where time moves differently~ a cave in a far off region~ or there is a museum just for experiencing how the laws of physics acted on this planet 20 years ago....

@David, @Matt: Now we're talking!

The P=NP thing is phenomenal.

Hi long time listener first time caller. So, apparently every few hundred thousand years, the earth's magnetic poles go screwy. They don't just wander like they do now, but they flip, so north is south and south is north but what if a) that happened right now and b) they didn't go all the way? What if they just went to the equator?

What if the "North Pole" was at Equador? We're not changing the axis (I mean, that's CRAZY - though apparently that happens too), just the magnetic poles.

I was just thinking of the same thing, Photomatt! What if light's speed *slowed* or sped up over time?

This is one pseudo-theory put forth by creationists to explain why we see the light from stars millions of light-years away.

But I'm more interested in its effect on computing. If electromagnetic radiation got 1% faster every decade, would that do much to Moore's Law? Would it destroy electronics as we know them? Could we still develop GPS while constantly recalculating relativity?

@nick: electrons in silicon move at about 1/3rd of c, and currently that's not the limit being seen by designers; mostly it's how to dissipate heat, of which there would be slightly more with an increase in C (I think; we're at the edge of my armchair physics knowledge here).

Since learning about the aeolipile - en.wikipedia.org - basically a steam engine circa 1st century AD - I've wondered what would have happened if the ancient Greeks had developed and harnessed this as mechanical/motive power instead of a novelty.

Small things

@Anna Baas - I like the scale change but go the other way. There is no land mas larger than maybe Hawaii? So they are spread out everywhere across the ocean. Island density is much higher. How would the ancient empires play out? How would Alexander the Great maintain an empire spread out across thousands of islands. What types of cultures would develop on each island. And would we have a primarily boat culture instead of the current car culture? The USA would be become UIA as in "The United Islands of America"?

I think this idea of knowing that there is life elsewhere in the universe would change the long-held constant that we are alone in the universe. This alone would create significantly make our world more interesting and the universe ripe for adventure.

@Elisabeth @Erik if gravity was smaller due to the planet being smaller, we could be taller, maybe. The atmosphere would be thinner, as well, so we might have more red blood cells. I'd prefer the version with a heavier core (some lead mixed into the iron?) so that gravity wouldn't change too much.

@Joshua oh, that's interesting! How would people identify with their geographic and political environments? How many languages would we have? I like it.

What if the sun's luminosity varied? Currently we all have our typical skintone which by and large we cannot change. If sun exposure varied perhaps our bodies would have adapted to change as well. I'm thinking of a chameleon here, I suppose. Would make being sneaky a piece of cake.

a chemical difference in all alcohol molecules that eliminates the effects of intoxication in humans.

What if the center of the Earth was made of a unique metal, capable of absorbing and storing energy like a battery, but not in a chemical form of potential energy. Just in pure electricity ?
What if this energy was giving its mass to the center of the Earth ? What if we were able to use this material to store energy and deliver it in a fraction on seconds like for Supercapacitors ?

To riff on Anna and Charlotte's musings on plate tectonics... what if we sped up the process up drastically? Rather than "drifting" a few centimeters, the seafloor spreads by a 2-8 kilometers each year.

The world map hanging up in a 3rd grader's classroom needs to be redrawn more frequently than during the breakup of the Soviet Union. Immigration and travel patterns change as land bridges appear and disappear (e.g. Australia is slated to collide with S.E. Asia in 50 million years... this could happen in 500 or even 50). Every day, the world has a little bit less California and a noticeably more Iceland. Seattle goes under the Pacific, block by city block.

How would we build for this world? What would we eat? What language would we speak?

Would it then be more likely that people would be born with "swimfeat" (yes, I am thinking about Kevin Costner in Waterworld)?

en.wikipedia.org

@Patrick I love it. The liquid planet.

Each year, late winter to be specific, I eagerly watch for the first green signs of Spring. And each year I wonder what would happen if the trees didn't grow leaves and the flowers and shrubs didn't bloom? What if, collectively, they said 'Enough is enough. We demand fair treatment! We're striking to support our brethren threatened by yet another strip mall. You don't need another UPS Store!'

How would mankind react to such ultimatum, I wonder? Hopefully better than it has for climate change!

How about if children were naturally good or docile, subservient, quiet, even dull and we had to teach them to cut loose a little else the world become uninteresting and unproductive.

What if water was just a little less "sticky"? Meaning it didn't "stick" to your body when you took a shower, no need for a towel but also would make it harder to clean things. Water wouldn't attach to leaves and flowers when it rained. Things could no longer be wet. Changing water just a little bit would have enormous impacts on hygiene, how we grow food, etc.

How about if typical pets (dogs, cats, goldfish) lived longer lives, almost as long as long as their human masters. What could you teach your dog, or what could you learn from your cat? Would they accompany you everywhere including work and church? Would they become a part of productive society for example helping teachers in a classroom. Would they be considered as part of the job interview?

I love love the idea of slightly faster plate tectonics. I've often wondered what would happen at the continued intersection of geology and humanity. Right now, we just get natural disasters. But what if we could kind of casually watch California drift off? Or Indonesia collide in to Australia?

The other thing, and has been alluded to here, what if the moon was just a little closer? It's getting closer now, but what if that process was sped up?

What if time was faster? I guess that's what I'm saying. Just a little bit. What if our perception of time and time itself was just tweaked?

What if the Earth was a disc, carried by four elephants on the back of giant..., oh wait, somebody thought of that before... Ok, talking animals then.

The consequences of P=NP could be deeply strange. One disturbing consequence is that you can no longer say, "Yeah, that's a really hard problem." because they're not. With sufficient computing power they're all solvable.

Flip it 180 degrees so Australia's on top.

like #Photomattmills said, but make the speed of light to be something low, like 100 km/hour

What if there was no energetic constant, so that we could not only convert between forms of energy (matter, light, etc) but also create it from nothing.

Or, alternatively, what if general physics followed quantum physical laws instead? So that, for instance, anything was prone to simply vanishing and reappearing somewhere else.

Were gravity and atmospherics reversed, we would have evolved as a species with large suckers on our appendages and lungs that chemically processed a low-volume oxygen atmosphere. Our exterior shells would be impervious to large pressure surges and the sky would probably not be blue.

@toomuchnick @Photomattmills @opikalo I'll just leave this here: gamelab.mit.edu

Wormholes. Specifically a wormhole near my home that would take me to various places of interest where there were other wormholes. There's a wormhole in Berkeley no doubt, as well as one in Maui. And Istanbul (Old Town), The Great Wall of China, and Amsterdam. There's a wormhole just outside this great little sidewalk cafe in Paris. And one near my parents' home.

And @M A R K offered the same idea as mine. It would be both wonderful and terrifying to move around the earth, relatively at will via wormhole. Also, I'm assuming some way of making travel/movement in this way either free or very, very low cost.

I was thinking free and open to everyone. Of course, then we have to think about the traffic. Are the wormholes crowded? Do they become like pedestrian interstate highways?

Off-Branch, I got a tip about a classic science fiction writer named Hal Clement who has a whole host of stories and novels that probe some of these possibilities.

I just downloaded this one, which isn't so much about a change in the earth as a change in perspective, but it looks super good:

amazon.com

So when looking at that list of constants, my eye was automatically drawn to light. Rather than think of changing it, what if we considered the whole idea of light being the constant as a philosophical principle? It's not a new idea. A book on yoga (weird source of perspective on physics, I know) I read suggested taking "Let there be light" in the Bible as the literal ground for Creation. A world in which everything is a manifestation of light, and what happens when human beings, conscious of that, are able to manipulate it. I hope that makes sense in some way?

Because of my utter failure at mathematics, I'd tweak the lot out of existence. To ensure that the resulting world is interesting, we might have to extrapolate the path of evolution on such a world. This is reasonable, if we expect to engage our readers. After all, who wants to read about synaesthethic glowworms floating in brine? (Well, if you ever played Spore, you might.)

So, consider expunging mathematics, keeping the other interesting bits of our world. I would start by erasing those constants, one-by-one, until the impact of accumulated absences destroys any hope of making sense of the imagined world.

First to go would be the speed of light. This is not far-fetched. After all, man got along well enough before James Clerk Maxwell.

I was just chatting about a Hal Clement story off Branch, too. The one called "Proof," about creatures that live inside stars.

So we don't even have to tweak our contstants to imagine entirely different states of being; just change where we live and it would be a whole new world.

variety-sf.blogspot.com

The tweak that comes to mind is a much smaller-scale thing: What if, upon sleeping in a low-humidity house, you woke up not with a dry nasal passage and a nosebleed, but with dry synapses and [whatever the brain equivalent of a nosebleed is]? Or just had a harder time thinking for a little while.

This is not really as scientific as what's been stated. But what if we were just shorter? What if we'd stayed short, like those dwarf skeletons found on Java? Everything else stays the same size, but humans are just 4 feet max? How would the world change?

It occurs to me that Will Self was attempting this with Great Ape. His tweak was simple: what if chimps were the humans?

And it worked. So, what if we still came out on top, what if the world is as it is, but we're just all short?

Hi there, I don't have any one tweak in mind, but some potential research material. If you haven't read the EXCELLENT Myst video game tie-in novels "The Book of Atrus" and it's sequels I recommend them. The authors go into much greater detail about what does and does not work when the D'ni are creating their worlds, and gives some great examples through the lens of Atrus' and Catherine's own learning process. Happy reading!

amazon.com

Scientists are fairly certain that the universe is continuously expanding, and will never stop. The whole of existence will one day come apart into silence and darkness. What if the universe were instead contracting--and humanity was still around to experience it? This may require a future in which we've colonized more distant planets or solar systems, escaping from Earth before it is consumed by the sun.

Expanding on Anne's point above, what if the universe expanded to a nice round number - say 10 million light years across - and then just stopped dead? As humanity (and/or other species) expanded into space, would there be escalating turf wars?

What if chimps, dolphins, or maybe parrots were smarter? Still less smart than humans, but smart enough to communicate with (and make demands of) human civilization?

I would like a longer day - like 100 hours. Sleep for 8 hours, work for 8 hours, then have 84 hours left where we don't have to do all of the things (take a shower, get dressed, etc) that we normally would have to do over and over again.

Nice, Anne! I love the idea of present or near-future humans experiencing any of the cosmic changes we know will happen in millions or billions of years (when humans will likely be extinct or godlike immortal galaxy-hoppers).

Earlier this week, Jason Kottke talked about Wikipedia's "timeline of the far future", which names when Niagara Falls erodes away, when Earth's multicellular life dies out, when our galaxy collides with another, and when ALL MATTER BECOMES LIQUID. (If today were the universe's first birthday since the Big Bang, that last one would happen on its 10^56th birthday.)

Changes to gravity constants, atmosphere composition, and plate tectonics have pretty drastic consequences. Consider the results of just a few degrees' worth of climate change are: Vikings are now farming in Greenland and "primitive" nomadic tribes of Asian steppes gallop from near-starvation to world domination in a single generation.

I tried a few thought experiments with things like the Boltzmann constant, but they all basically led to the human race dying out.

What if something happens that fundamentally changes how our economy functions -- like the Russian "field of diamonds" discovery, but even more drastic. Say, we have unlimited oil but almost no more iron. How fast do you think we'd set up a mining operation on Mercury?

What if, as a species, we were all (more) near-sighted? instead of 20/20, 100/20 is the norm. How would architecture, art, machines, tools change? At that point, our ability to recognize faces at distance is significantly affected, and therefore how we interact with others is affected. Would we be more wary of strangers? Would houses and rooms get smaller? Streets narrower?

What if alcohol did not have an intoxicating effect on the human system? This is apparently controlled by a single brain protein (ucsf.edu). What if it was suddenly under-expressed in a large fraction of the population?

No more children. Or at least widespread infertility.

That would have implications economically, ecologically, and it would just be weird.

Or only children. No adults.

Being a college student may be one of the closest things to experiencing this. Everywhere I look, people my own age. And you might not even notice it, until you come home to family, but if you do, it's quite an odd feeling.

Christopher - sounds like PD James' Children of Men (also a movie with the same name).

fall, I am astonished again at how hard the ground is.

I'd want the Aurora Borealis to be more prevalent. And I would want there to be some natural human reaction to it, kind of like when you visit the ocean.

I've been reading the kindle Serial "The Many Lives of Lilith Lane" by E.V. Anderson, and in that story the author explores the idea of worm holes embedded in the Earth, and the means of passing through them by setting a machine to a specific frequency and falling from a tall building. A cool Idea.

amazon.com

Not that it's a constant, but changing the friction coefficients humans have with interacting objects would be intriguing. It would be difficult to walk, sit, stand, drink a cup of coffee, everything we take for granted.

What if Water wasn't required to sustain life? And the Earth instead of being made up of 70% Water, was only 20% Water. Of course to us, that would be such a drastic change, but in another reality, maybe they survive on photosynthesis?

I know it's not in keeping with the "plausible" tweak of constraints, but I would like chess games to have some physical expression - what happens on the board is somehow reflected in real life.

@Dmitriy This made me smile: "I tried a few thought experiments with things like the Boltzmann constant, but they all basically led to the human race dying out." Ha! Yeah, turns out those constants are pretty fine-tuned, huh…

What if we already had teleportation… I like to think about it more like "instant travel" in the same way the internet is "instant information". It’d probably be super mundane: there would be a Teleport Stop on your street where you would queue in the morning to get to work. You could pay dodgy people to smuggle you to other countries, though unauthorised gates.

Another thing, pretty weird and related to constants, if Plank’s constant en.wikipedia.org (which dictates why light diffracts through small gaps) wasn't 6.6x10^-36 but was just 6 travelling in a car under a bridge or something would cause you to 'diffract' so you wouldn’t know where you would come out on the other side… Kinda ridiculous… But fun all the same :D

Fred, I think if you looked at the lives of chessplayers, you would find that to be true.

@Fred, there is no reason that your idea couldn't be plausible. Look at Hunger Games and its ilk. What if EVERYTHING depended on the ebb and flow of various chess games? Armies could wage wars across boards and the results would be binding.

A Caissiocracy...

What if more hominid species had survived and evolved alongside Homo Sapiens? What would a civilized world be like with several species involved?

Moving from physics to biochemistry, what if Earth had two different mutually incompatible ecosystems based on chirality? In the real world, Life as We Know It is overwhelmingly based on left-handed proteins, where all the amino acids are asymmetric in the same direction. It's somewhat of a mystery as to why this is so, but a leading hypothesis suggests that it's basically chance - life started out left-handed and just kept going in that direction.

What if, instead, there were two "origin of life" events in the protoplasmic Precambrian past, leading to parallel streams of evolution and parallel ecosystems? You could still eat members of the other chirality, but your digestive enzymes couldn't incorporate their amino acids into your body.

Similarly, diseases and poisons that evolved in one chirality couldn't affect the other. If alternate history is your thing, imagine Columbus arriving in the West Indies – only to find that the natives weren't exactly human and his crew couldn't derive nourishment from any of the plants or animals there. Guns, <strike>Germs</strike> and Steel.

Something in the same vein but a little more simplistic: what if no living things needed anything to survive except air to breathe--no food, sunlight, water, etc. that could create some interesting situations. Flowers could thrive in deserts; many diseases and conditions would cease to exist, except for hereditary issues; people could live anywhere; gatherings centered around food would cease to exist, just to name a few.

Yeah, it's hard to imagine universal constants changing and humans stlll being here. If the world is still defined as the place where humans live, then maybe the tweaks need to be biological.
So to reproduce yourself, you need 3, or 4, or 5 (or more) intimate connections, or perhaps you need to have built a network or a biome conducive to creating new life. Perhaps humans haven't figured out all the parameters reproduction requires, so they're having to recreate ecologies, hoping that something "clicks." Or maybe we discover or develop a new sense that enables us to adapt to climate change. Maybe everyone (who survives) learns yoga and develops the ability to partially shut down or hibernate as needed.

Even more basic: duality goes away. It's no longer male/female, right/left, positive/negative. Maybe it's all triples. Maybe it's random. Maybe the new sense people develop is like a phantom limb, the "third hand" or the multiple limbs of a many-armed goddess. The more things you're able to hold in consciousness, the more phantom arms you grow, the more you can juggle whatever life throws at you. Thoughts literally become things. Energy becomes matter.

First a couple of previous forays re physical constants:

Stephen Baxter's "Raft" boosts "G".

Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" turns on subtle variations in physical constants.

It might be interesting to play with compressibility of materials. Wil McCarthy's "Queendom of Sol" series features hyperdense material used to give asteroids ("planettes") respectable surface gravity.

I'm reminded of Bob Shaw's "Orbitsville", where a Dyson sphere is a honey trap whose attraction is that there's too much living space to quarrel over -- not a change of physical constants, but physical constraints.

I'd be intrigued by a slightly more sensitive mirror neuron system. The opposite -- low empathy -- is a theme of Neal Barrett Jr's "Stress Pattern".

To riff off an idea earlier mentioned: denser air plus stronger gravity. Humanity is a big-boned, slow-moving species, perhaps communicating predominantly nonverbally. What would you do if you could only "do" about 5-7 things a day? Automate a lot, surely--then what, once that is out of the way?

I imagine a Machiavellian society of long-term plans, Bene-Gesserit-style wheels within wheels, colliding and coming to fruition over the course of decades (visualize galaxies spinning and crashing in slow motion).

But then what would it be like to be the one person who could move quicker? Maybe you can't do much more than steer these titans. How could you change the trajectories of behemoths already in motion?

Hi guys, first time poster. I like the discussion, found this crazy statistical law and I thought I might share it.
What about Zipf's law? This is a crazy power-law distribution that pops up pretty much anywhere there is a system of elements and finite resources. It pops up in language, metabolic rate in mitochondria, and even in the growth of cities. You can read about it here:
en.wikipedia.org
Here it is being applied to language
arxiv.org
So what if Zipf's law no longer applied to distributions? You'd have books where no word is repeated twice (oh the horror!), or countries consisting of one megacity and a bunch of small hovels. And that would be normal- No more regular patterns, fibonacci sequences, etc. Itd be chaos!

good question, @robinsloan !

I would most definitely make our planet rotate just a little more slowly. I'm too physics-ally challenged to understand all the negative implications, but I would sure love another 1-2 hours per day.

Also maybe a little tweak to mitigate climate change problems, but not sure what we could do that wouldn't just be palliative here at the geophysical level without addressing the human behavioral issues at hand...

Hi @Daniel ---
Your suggestion made me realize, for the first time since considering these "suspension" of laws, that laws are a function of the things to which they apply, not the other way 'round!

To answer your suggestion, I assert that, if Zipf's Law, or any rank data function, no longer applied, that would have no effect on the distribution, rank or frequency of the thing measured. As a consequence, those attributes might still prevail!

Of course, now I've written this, I realize that the heart of your suggestion is the consequence: what if "[you had] books where no word is repeated twice (oh the horror!), or countries consisting of one megacity and a bunch of small hovels."

@mitchell my mistake i should have clarified. I meant that the phenomenon we have labelled Zipf's law is no longer binding, or relates frequencies in a different way than we might expect.

wherein maxwell's demon violates the laws of thermodynamics

en.m.wikipedia.org

@Daniel, Got it. In fact, your clarification reminds me of the stuff I read about field theory. I am not comfortable with physics, but I find the history of all of those theories to be fascinatiing. Thankfully, people like Michio Kaku make this material accessible.
en.wikipedia.org

@Matt And of course another thing this scenario has going for it: the wonderfulness of the word "chirality." I mean, I'd put that on the front of a book in a second. THE CHIRALITY CHRONICLES.

@Sam Yes: a sneaky Maxwell's Demon. Or maybe a lazy one.

@Daniel I like that a lot; it strikes me as similar to the P=NP change suggested up above, in that (a) the effects would be far-reaching and hard to predict—which is a good/interesting thing—and (b) it's not entirely clear HOW that change would come about—also a good/interesting.

I mean, it feels like a strange metaphysical decree indeed to say: "Aaand… all statistical distributions are different!" And strange metaphysical decrees are exactly what I was after.

In that spirit, here's a decree of my own: this thread is now closed! Thanks for all the great suggestions, folks. I'm just delighted at the range of smart, strange ideas on display here.