It's not that the individual atoms didn't exist before they joined, but it's that they start oscillating in unison with each other in a pattern that emerges pur

It's not that the individual atoms didn't exist before they joined, but it's that they start oscillating in unison with each other in a pattern that emerges purely from wave interactions. Nature settles into the most stable patterns of oscillation it can find, even without anything "causing that". To fully understand this kind of emergence you need to realize even the following video is in the same category of phenomenology called "emergence": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v5eBf2KwF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v5eBf2KwF8 Atoms themselves "emerge" from probability waves, not the other way around. On a wild tangent: I believe all emergent patterns represent "negative entropy" so I claim this disproves the Second Law of Thermodynamics, because it fails to take into account (i.e. quantify) "pattern-ness" or "order" in systems. Total entropy of the universe maybe doesn't increase but remains at zero, where the order perfectly counterbalances the randomness. Since there's no way to "measure" order in a system, the Second Law remains somewhat philosophical despite it being consistent with 'gross averages' measurements like temperatures, pressures, volumes, etc., in classical systems for which essentially only one side of the equation can be quantified.