Why nature needs 1/f noise

While ubiquitous at all levels of organization in nature, including in nanotechnology, low-frequency 1/f noise is not yet understood. A possible reason is the unjustified application of probability theory concepts, primarily that of independence, to random physical phenomena. We show that in the framework of statistical mechanics, no medium can impart a definite diffusivity and mobility to a particle that performs random walk through it, which gives rise to flicker fluctuations in these properties. A universal source of 1/f noise in many-particle systems in this example is a dependence of the time behavior of any particular relaxation or transport process on the details of the initial microstate of the system as a whole.