The light turns green. Theoretically, if the 6 cars in front of me and I all accelerate at the same time and at the same rate, we should be able to to start moving as a block as soon as the light turns green, thus eliminating the need to wait for the ripple of forward motion to reach all the way back to me. Now, I know that there are a number of things that would have to align for this to happen – strictly speaking, there are a lot of variables here, and it’s fairly likely that you could repeat this a million times and not get it to work.
But I’ve stopped at way more than a million stoplights, I assume, or I will have stopped at way more than a million before I die. On some probabilistic level, like the 10,000 monkeys typing away, this should happen simply due to a random confluence of events. And yet, every time the light turns green, I inch forward only to see that 3 of the 5 cars ahead of me are waiting for the ripple to reach them. And I’m pretty sure it will somehow never happen, which seems wrong.
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