Comment by keeganpoppen
9 hours ago
> Does aperiodicity have any cool properties that help in specific domains?
well, it helps as the basis for all life on the planet as we know it (DNA, RNA, et al.). which is pithy, but i think actually has fairly deep implications (ie is not _just_ pithy).
DNA is one-dimensional aperiodicity, which is ... fairly common. This sentence is one-dimensionally aperiodic!
Most biological structures are amorphous in some way, rather than strictly aperiodic. There are structures (honeycombs, for example) that are extremely regular, and especially on smaller scales (like virus capsids). Other biological structures are loosely fractal (self-similar across a narrow range) - lungs, blood systems, and so on.
I don't know of any biological structures that could accurately be described as aperiodic - like a quasicrystal - but given I'm just learning about Defense-associated reverse transcriptases, it would not surprise me if there is something out there.
> well, it helps as the basis for all life on the planet as we know it (DNA, RNA, et al.)
And how much of that would we have understood if not for Mendeleev allowing us to discover new elements thanks to the periodicity of its table?
Elements in Mendeleev's table are at a lower level than DNA / RNA.