“Information is All, Is it Not?” - Ernst Stavros Blofeld, SPECTRE.
A paradox, at its heart, is a statement that seems self-contradictory but reveals a deeper truth when examined closely. Even if it is just a light-hearted thought experiment.
The Green M&M Paradox begins with something almost offensively ordinary - a single candy in a half-second TV shot - and then exposes how that trivial object defeats our assumptions about impermanence, randomness, and meaning.
On one side of the paradox, physics insists that all material things dissolve: Matter decays, atoms scatter and that entropy wins. A lone green M&M that appeared in a 2020 Unwrapped episode was no exception. Either within moments, or after months, its sugars broke down, its dyes faded, and its atoms dispersed into air, water, and landfill - either by the action of consumption or being thrown out. According to thermodynamics, that candy ceased to exist.
But the other side of the paradox says otherwise. Because the candy was filmed, stored, and later noticed, its image and story now exist in countless places - in servers, in human memory, in this very paragraph. Its physical form is gone, but its pattern persists. In that sense, the universe did not erase it; it only transferred it from the material register to the informational one.
That’s the paradox: a thing that no longer exists still continues to exist.
Once something is observed - once light hits a camera sensor or the retina of an eye - it becomes information, and information can outlast the matter that carried it. Every act of attention effectively “saves” an event to the cosmic ledger, converting physical chance into enduring record. That process reverses entropy locally, because each copy, replay, and recollection rebuilds order from decay.
So the paradox isn’t about candy - it’s about the physics of noticing. It shows that the universe keeps what consciousness attends to. The same logic applies to the Colosseum, the Mona Lisa, a memory, or a loved one’s face. None persist because their molecules are special; they persist because billions of acts of observation keep them anchored in existence.
In that light, the forgotten M&M is not forgotten at all. It has transcended matter by being remembered - by me, and now by you, right now - which means the universe has once again proven incapable of letting go.
So, that is the heart of the paradox: physical matter obeys thermodynamics and decays, yet the act of noticing transfers its structure into a more durable substrate: information. The universe forgets atoms but remembers patterns. What we observe does not merely exist; it continues to exist because it was observed. The Green M&M is not just a candy - it’s a measurable example of how awareness itself is a creative force, collapsing probability into permanence.
And that leads to the story.
A paradox, at its heart, is a statement that seems self-contradictory but reveals a deeper truth when examined closely. Even if it is just a light-hearted thought experiment.
The Green M&M Paradox begins with something almost offensively ordinary - a single candy in a half-second TV shot - and then exposes how that trivial object defeats our assumptions about impermanence, randomness, and meaning.
On one side of the paradox, physics insists that all material things dissolve: Matter decays, atoms scatter and that entropy wins. A lone green M&M that appeared in a 2020 Unwrapped episode was no exception. Either within moments, or after months, its sugars broke down, its dyes faded, and its atoms dispersed into air, water, and landfill - either by the action of consumption or being thrown out. According to thermodynamics, that candy ceased to exist.
But the other side of the paradox says otherwise. Because the candy was filmed, stored, and later noticed, its image and story now exist in countless places - in servers, in human memory, in this very paragraph. Its physical form is gone, but its pattern persists. In that sense, the universe did not erase it; it only transferred it from the material register to the informational one.
That’s the paradox: a thing that no longer exists still continues to exist.
Once something is observed - once light hits a camera sensor or the retina of an eye - it becomes information, and information can outlast the matter that carried it. Every act of attention effectively “saves” an event to the cosmic ledger, converting physical chance into enduring record. That process reverses entropy locally, because each copy, replay, and recollection rebuilds order from decay.
So the paradox isn’t about candy - it’s about the physics of noticing. It shows that the universe keeps what consciousness attends to. The same logic applies to the Colosseum, the Mona Lisa, a memory, or a loved one’s face. None persist because their molecules are special; they persist because billions of acts of observation keep them anchored in existence.
In that light, the forgotten M&M is not forgotten at all. It has transcended matter by being remembered - by me, and now by you, right now - which means the universe has once again proven incapable of letting go.
So, that is the heart of the paradox: physical matter obeys thermodynamics and decays, yet the act of noticing transfers its structure into a more durable substrate: information. The universe forgets atoms but remembers patterns. What we observe does not merely exist; it continues to exist because it was observed. The Green M&M is not just a candy - it’s a measurable example of how awareness itself is a creative force, collapsing probability into permanence.
And that leads to the story.
Every so often, a tiny, ridiculous detail becomes the perfect metaphor for existence. This one started with a half-second clip of a green M&M, and ended up eating an embarrassing amount of my time. A completely random thought that became etch-a-sketched in my head.
Figure 1. Frame 3:01 from Unwrapped (Season 7, Episode 8) — The bowl pour sequence featuring the sideways green M&M.
In a 2020 episode of Unwrapped, there’s a quick shot of a bowl filled with M&Ms - nothing remarkable, just color and gloss under studio light. Near the top-left edge, at roughly 11 O’clock, one green candy has toppled sideways against a blue. It lasts half a second on screen, a meaningless blur to millions of viewers. And yet, here we are talking about that one.
That green M&M was one of roughly 2.5 million made in a single factory batch - one speck in a vat of molten chocolate, roughly the size of a standard swimming pool. Those candies are funneled through optical sorters, color drums, and vibrating conveyors before being poured by the tens of thousands into 50,000 separate bags moving along a humming line of beltways (≈ 1 in 50,000). Each bag is sealed, boxed, palletized, and lifted by forklifts into eighteen-wheelers that fan out across the interstate grid, feeding thousands of destinations from supermarkets to vending distributors (another ≈ 1 in 50,000).
Picture that map: highways traced in light, hundreds of trucks dispersing millions of tiny, colorful, delicious spheres across continents, every turn and traffic light another branching fork of probability.
Now imagine a few of those bags arrive on one of those pallets - eventually being carried into a studio in California - maybe through a convenience-store pickup, maybe through a random prop assistant’s grocery run. Out of all the world’s candy, that single bag is opened, poured, and one green M&M - this one - comes to rest in the bowl you see on screen. Multiply those filters together and you approach at least one in 10²⁵ under conservative assumptions, and more likely on the order of 10⁻⁴⁰ once you include the chaos of real-world behavior: routing choices, shaking of the bag, pour turbulence, and the one-in-eight-billion chance that someone (some weirdo?) would later pause that exact frame and notice that exact candy. *insert waving emoji*
That’s about the same as choosing one atom from all the matter in a hundred galaxies.
Probability Ladder - The Path of One Green M&M
Factory batch: 1 in 2,500,000
↓
Bag assignment: 1 in 50,000
↓
Distribution route: 1 in 50,000
↓
Studio selection & filming: 1 in 1,000,000,000
↓
Final televised frame: ≈ 1 in 10³⁰–10⁴⁰
The math is rooted in Mars Inc. production reports (~2.5 million candies per batch), Kantar retail distribution data (~50,000 retail units per run), and Nielsen advertising exposure statistics estimating that fewer than one in a billion candies ever appear on camera. Add in chaos factors - truck routing, bag shaking, filming sequence, camera focus, and viewer behavior - and you easily reach the 10⁻⁴⁰ range.
By the time the studio lights cooled, the candy itself was almost certainly gone - eaten, swept up, or dissolved somewhere in a landfill. Thermodynamics would say the universe forgot it.
But the universe didn’t forget. A camera caught the pattern of its reflected light. Servers stored those digits. Years later, my eyes decoded the photons again, and neurons fired to recognize that green one. The candy’s molecules are dust, yet its image - its coordinates in the field of awareness - are alive. The probability of finding it again was near zero; the probability of meaning arising from it is now one. For the 2.4 million viewers of the video, it was a flash or peripheral blur. But I stopped and looked right at it. Since then I’ve even watched the 3 second bowl pour in slow motion watching that green M&M get bombarded by others while it seemingly clung to the side of the bowl.
Every object in existence waits for that same resurrection. The moment something is seen, measured, or remembered, it becomes part of the active record of the universe. Attention pulls it from statistical obscurity into relevance. A rock in a driveway, a rusted bicycle frame, a 3 cent ‘feeder’ goldfish at Petco - each collapses from anonymity into significance the instant it’s noticed.
That’s why the Mona Lisa still breathes through glass and climate control five centuries later: billions of eyes keep re-creating her, in books, in classes, at the Louvre. The Colosseum persists not only because its stones remain, but because minds keep circling it, feeding it definition. Awareness is a kind of gravitational field that binds information to being.
So when we talk about a forgotten candy from a forgotten episode, we’re not indulging in nostalgia; we’re demonstrating the mechanics of memory itself. Entropy dissolves form, but perception keeps rewriting the ledger. Now, a green M&M as the star in a physics paper? Kind of silly. Or is it?
Related reading: Unwrapped - “M&Ms” episode (3:01 mark).
See also the Red Cup Effect for a similar frame-persistence study. Sort of the ongoing after effect due to my noticing.
With thanks to M&M maker Monte Brooks, Food Network archivists, the unknown prop assistant, the 2.4 million YouTube viewers who kept the frame alive - and now you, the reader, who keeps the story alive.
Below you may find my more rigorous submission in defense of my noticing - The Green M&M Paradox. Thank you as always.
Figure 1. Frame 3:01 from Unwrapped (Season 7, Episode 8) — The bowl pour sequence featuring the sideways green M&M.
In a 2020 episode of Unwrapped, there’s a quick shot of a bowl filled with M&Ms - nothing remarkable, just color and gloss under studio light. Near the top-left edge, at roughly 11 O’clock, one green candy has toppled sideways against a blue. It lasts half a second on screen, a meaningless blur to millions of viewers. And yet, here we are talking about that one.
That green M&M was one of roughly 2.5 million made in a single factory batch - one speck in a vat of molten chocolate, roughly the size of a standard swimming pool. Those candies are funneled through optical sorters, color drums, and vibrating conveyors before being poured by the tens of thousands into 50,000 separate bags moving along a humming line of beltways (≈ 1 in 50,000). Each bag is sealed, boxed, palletized, and lifted by forklifts into eighteen-wheelers that fan out across the interstate grid, feeding thousands of destinations from supermarkets to vending distributors (another ≈ 1 in 50,000).
Picture that map: highways traced in light, hundreds of trucks dispersing millions of tiny, colorful, delicious spheres across continents, every turn and traffic light another branching fork of probability.
Now imagine a few of those bags arrive on one of those pallets - eventually being carried into a studio in California - maybe through a convenience-store pickup, maybe through a random prop assistant’s grocery run. Out of all the world’s candy, that single bag is opened, poured, and one green M&M - this one - comes to rest in the bowl you see on screen. Multiply those filters together and you approach at least one in 10²⁵ under conservative assumptions, and more likely on the order of 10⁻⁴⁰ once you include the chaos of real-world behavior: routing choices, shaking of the bag, pour turbulence, and the one-in-eight-billion chance that someone (some weirdo?) would later pause that exact frame and notice that exact candy. *insert waving emoji*
That’s about the same as choosing one atom from all the matter in a hundred galaxies.
Probability Ladder - The Path of One Green M&M
Factory batch: 1 in 2,500,000
↓
Bag assignment: 1 in 50,000
↓
Distribution route: 1 in 50,000
↓
Studio selection & filming: 1 in 1,000,000,000
↓
Final televised frame: ≈ 1 in 10³⁰–10⁴⁰
The math is rooted in Mars Inc. production reports (~2.5 million candies per batch), Kantar retail distribution data (~50,000 retail units per run), and Nielsen advertising exposure statistics estimating that fewer than one in a billion candies ever appear on camera. Add in chaos factors - truck routing, bag shaking, filming sequence, camera focus, and viewer behavior - and you easily reach the 10⁻⁴⁰ range.
By the time the studio lights cooled, the candy itself was almost certainly gone - eaten, swept up, or dissolved somewhere in a landfill. Thermodynamics would say the universe forgot it.
But the universe didn’t forget. A camera caught the pattern of its reflected light. Servers stored those digits. Years later, my eyes decoded the photons again, and neurons fired to recognize that green one. The candy’s molecules are dust, yet its image - its coordinates in the field of awareness - are alive. The probability of finding it again was near zero; the probability of meaning arising from it is now one. For the 2.4 million viewers of the video, it was a flash or peripheral blur. But I stopped and looked right at it. Since then I’ve even watched the 3 second bowl pour in slow motion watching that green M&M get bombarded by others while it seemingly clung to the side of the bowl.
Every object in existence waits for that same resurrection. The moment something is seen, measured, or remembered, it becomes part of the active record of the universe. Attention pulls it from statistical obscurity into relevance. A rock in a driveway, a rusted bicycle frame, a 3 cent ‘feeder’ goldfish at Petco - each collapses from anonymity into significance the instant it’s noticed.
That’s why the Mona Lisa still breathes through glass and climate control five centuries later: billions of eyes keep re-creating her, in books, in classes, at the Louvre. The Colosseum persists not only because its stones remain, but because minds keep circling it, feeding it definition. Awareness is a kind of gravitational field that binds information to being.
So when we talk about a forgotten candy from a forgotten episode, we’re not indulging in nostalgia; we’re demonstrating the mechanics of memory itself. Entropy dissolves form, but perception keeps rewriting the ledger. Now, a green M&M as the star in a physics paper? Kind of silly. Or is it?
Related reading: Unwrapped - “M&Ms” episode (3:01 mark).
See also the Red Cup Effect for a similar frame-persistence study. Sort of the ongoing after effect due to my noticing.
With thanks to M&M maker Monte Brooks, Food Network archivists, the unknown prop assistant, the 2.4 million YouTube viewers who kept the frame alive - and now you, the reader, who keeps the story alive.
Below you may find my more rigorous submission in defense of my noticing - The Green M&M Paradox. Thank you as always.