Flash back to your youthful days in high school when you had to make that confusing decision: “Will I choose the humanities or the science track? Am I more of a lover of the subjective arts — or a pursuer of the hard sciences?”
Through the combination of dumb luck and abysmal grades, I somehow landed on the path of the humanities during high school. Today (16 years later) I realize such decisions were mostly academic cosmetics. The divide between the humanities and the sciences is not as tidy as high school curriculums present it to be.
A mastery of the arts does not exclude the importance of science, and a mastery of science does not negate the value of the arts. Even physics — arguably the most technical subject of them all — contains jewels of philosophy underneath its scribbles of equations. Let me show you.
Clausius’ Second Law of Thermodynamics: Embracing Change
Thermodynamics is the study of how energy behaves as it moves from one place to another and as it transforms from one form to another. The second law of thermodynamics states that in an isolated system, entropy (disorder) will always increase with the passage of time. This law was formulated by German physicist Rudolf Clausius in 1850.
The natural state of the physical world is not indefinite stability — but definite instability. Left alone, a hot cup of tea will naturally lose its heat. Left alone, a ripe fruit will naturally lose its sweet vibrancy. Left alone — one’s life circumstances, and one’s physical body, will head towards more disorder and decay.
As the American comedian Theo Von once put it — “Things do not know how to be good by themselves.” Things are not naturally in order for long periods of time. Left to its own devices — everything changes, transforms and decays. It is only through effortful work that we can try to delay (but never eliminate) the reality of entropy.
The whole medical industry is an attempt to delay and slow down the entropy of our biology. The whole beauty and make up industry is an attempt to cover up (literally) the entropy of our physical façade.
The harsh pill to swallow is this: As with any other law in physics — entropy is not personal. Regardless of how we feel about disorder and change, the laws of entropy will drag us along silently and indifferently.
Physical bodies will become weaker. Mental acuities will become blunter. Uncertainties become greater and more consequential with the passage of time.
If this dynamic is already inevitable, perhaps it will hurt much less if we are consciously along for the ride rather than being dragged by this thermodynamical truth.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion: Action and Reaction
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction — this is the third law of motion presented by Sir Isaac Newton in 1686.
If you place your phone on top of a table, two things are happening simultaneously. On the one hand, the phone is applying downward pressure to the tabletop.
But the reason the phone does not continuously move downwards to the core of the earth is because the table is applying an equal but opposite force upwards — so as to create a state of equilibrium whereby the phone and the table interacts in static harmony.
This physical law of balance between action and reaction is represented in the metaphysical concept of karma. In this ancient Indian concept, it is believed that good action will produce good reactions (outcomes) and vice versa. The concept of karma provides a valuable life lesson, regardless of your belief in its factual merits.
The monumental difference between Newton’s third law of motion and the metaphysical law of karma is in its time horizon. Newton’s third law of motion behaves instantaneously in the physical world. But the law of karma does not seem to be tangled by such immediacy.
If we apply a negative metaphysical force to a person, the reactionary force may not be applied back to us directly. It may take days, months, or even decades until such deeds are ‘served back’ to us. But the law maintains that at some point, every action will be met with an equal and opposite reaction.
It does not matter whether one is a student of Sir Isaac Newton or a student of the Buddha. The titan of physics and the father of enlightenment illuminate the same philosophy regarding our actions towards the world: Choose those actions wisely — with the assumption that they will eventually bounce back to you.
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity: Having Perspective
Time and space are not objective realities — the experience of time and space depends (is relative) upon the physical state of the observer. This was part of the findings in Einstein’s papers on relativity published in the early 1900s.
Before Einstein’s contributions, physicists perceived time to be an absolute and unchanging reality for any object in the universe. But Einstein’s mathematics proves that time is in fact relative — not absolute — in nature. Time slows down as objects move faster. In other words, the faster your speed, the slower time ticks away for you compared to someone who is stationary/moving at lower speeds than you.
This finding was astonishing as it fundamentally changed our understanding of space, time, and reality itself. Even something as fundamental — something as basic — as time itself is not fixed in objective reality. Even the movement of time itself — the ticking away of time — is a subjective phenomenon that is measurably different for different objects.
I am not a physicist. But the philosophical equation that can be derived from Einstein’s theory of relativity is much simpler than the calculus presented in his papers. And it is simply this:
There are approximately 8 billion people on the planet today. And according to established physics from Einstein, every single one of them is experiencing the dilation of time differently from person to person, and even from moment to moment.
If we cannot even share the experience of time in a universally objective manner — what about more complex things such as food preference? Color preference? Moral intuitions? Political dispositions? Ethical judgements? It is utterly impossible to perfectly and fully align ourselves with others on these more complex and subjective matters.
Acknowledging the existence of different perspectives is extremely powerful. And it comes about by realizing the relativity of everything in every situation. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. One man’s pain is another man’s pleasure. One man’s slum is another man’s pasture. As in the picture above, one man’s three is another man’s four.