The Atom and the Tree (and the kind of “decay” that isn’t inside)
I’ve been thinking a lot about radioactive decay lately, because it’s one of the cleanest examples we have of a universe that can be lawful without being personally predictable.
With radioactive decay, the weirdness isn’t that we “don’t know enough.” The weirdness is that the law itself doesn’t care about age. A uranium atom formed yesterday and one formed billions of years ago have the same probability per unit time of decaying. No fatigue. No countdown. No internal clock “approaching” the event. It’s memoryless in that strict statistical sense.
We can predict the ensemble perfectly well (half-life curves are reliable enough to anchor geology and archaeology), but for any single atom, the moment is opaque. Not because it’s hiding, but because the system doesn’t store the kind of history that would make “when” accumulate.
Then today I watched a tree come down.
Not in theory. Not as an abstraction. I saw the brutal snap. The sharp crack. The jagged, splintered place where it failed. It looked like violence written into wood grain. It was causal in the way reality is causal when it stops negotiating.
And the thought that hit me was simple:
No cell in that tree could know if it would be one of the cells destroyed by that break.
Even the “support” cells. Even the ones built for strength. Even the ones that spent their entire existence carrying load.
From the inside, it would feel like decay.
Not because the tree is radioactive — obviously it isn’t — but because the experience of the moment is the same: a system persists, and then suddenly it doesn’t, and nothing inside the local unit can say, “This is the second it happens.”
But here’s the key difference.
A tree is not memoryless.
A tree carries history:
- micro-cracks that don’t announce themselves
- rot you can’t see from the outside until it’s late
- fiber fatigue from years of storms
- moisture cycles that change stiffness and strength
- asymmetrical growth that creates hidden leverage
- old scars that behave like weak seams under new load
So why does it still feel like “random death” at the cell level?
Because the timing often isn’t authored by the tree.
The timing belongs to the field.
Wind doesn’t ask permission. Load doesn’t explain itself. A gust has a distribution. Tension changes. A branch shifts. A crown catches air. A line pulls. A truck passes. A storm arrives with its own cadence and its own statistics.
The tree isn’t choosing the moment.
The tree is being met by an external forcing process that crosses a threshold.
So you get two different “ways to die” that look similar from inside but are fundamentally different in structure:
Atomic decay: internal law, memoryless timing.
Tree failure: stored history + external trigger, threshold timing.
The atom is like: “any moment could be the moment.”
The tree is like: “the moment arrives when the outside world pushes the system past what its history can still hold.”
And that changes how I think about “predictability.”
Because from the inside — from the point of view of a single cell — both look like fate.
But from the outside — from the point of view of a witness — one can often be traced through causes, stresses, geometry, thresholds.
Which made me wonder: maybe the “decayer” isn’t always the object.
Maybe sometimes the “decayer” is the field.
Not mystical. Not metaphysical. Just layered reality:
- a thing has a capacity shaped by its history
- the world has forcing shaped by its own rhythms
- failure happens when forcing exceeds capacity
That’s it.
And watching that tree snap today made it visceral:
a system can feel like it “randomly dies” from inside,
while being completely explainable as a threshold crossing from outside.
The atom and the tree are different kinds of endings.
But they share the same inside-truth:
No one cell knows.
No one unit can point to the second.
And yet the universe remains lawful.