I call it "congnitve triangulation," and it is even more effective than numerical triangulation. It is based on the fact that when we encounter an unknown phenomenon, we try to connect it with thing that we already known.
However, if we can come up with a completely independent line of reasoning that gives us the same answer, we immediately take notice. Our brains cement our conclusions with an "aha!" moment, accompanied by feelings of joy and certainty--no doubt because two independent lines of thought arriving at the same conclusion are much likely to be caused by some regularity of the world than by sheet coincidence.
"A real electron and a real photon are maybe just fluctuations of the string-net", Wen said. For example, water freezes into ice, by describing it as the breaking of a symmetry: Whereas liquid water hasrotational symmetry at the atomic scale (it looks the same in every direction), the \(H_2O\) molecules in ice are locked in crystalline rows and colummns.
Things changed in 1982 with the discovery of phase called fractional quantum Hall states in an ultracold, two-dimensional gas of electrons.
In 1989, Wen imagined phases like the fractional quantum Hall states arising not on a plane, but on different toplogical manifolds---connetcted spaces such as the surface of a sphere or a torus.
Researchers studying the genetic the genetic code have gradually determined that is codon-amino acid assignments are decidedly not random. They instead seem to be a product of natural selection, optimized to generate a favorable degree of genetic diversity, as well as to help safeguard the organism's cells against the kinds of errors that tend to occur most frequently during the process of protein synthesis.
"For what we have." said Chang Liu, a synthetic biologist at the University of California, Irvine, "it's better than a one-in-a-million code."
But while "the genetic code is a very long way from random," Freeland said, "it's also a very long way from perfect." That is, it may be locally optimal--- the best of the many, many codes made possible by the chemistry of 20 amino acids --- but that doesn't necessarily mean it's globally best. "What Darwinism does." Benner said, "is to search locally in the sequence space. You get by with what works."