TWO

           “What kind of person are you...Good or bad?” Ask this question yourself or anyone around you, the most probable answer would be, “Am sometimes good and sometimes bad, it depends on the situation” or would reply like, “Am good to good guys and bad to bad guys” But the persons who can be grouped as “good” alone or as “bad” alone, are those who had stood in the heart of people and history.

Bad means, being really good at being bad. Like the ‘Joker’ in ‘The Dark Knight movie’. Even in a class, the teacher will remember only the students who score 100 and the students who score 0, because both are special. Scoring zero is as hard as scoring 100. If you think am kidding, think back your own marks. You would have scored 10’s, 20’s… 90’s, 99, and even 100 sometimes. But how often have you scored ‘ZERO’?  Honestly I haven’t scored zero. So next time, never mock at a person who scores zeroJ 

 

                Consider Gandhi and Hitler. Gandhi was very good. Hitler was very good at being very bad. World can never forget both of them, not really because of their deeds, but because they never hid their own self. One proclaimed, “Yes! I am good” through his actions, and another one proclaimed through his actions, “Yes! I am bad”. They were never afraid to reveal the world their own self. Not only them, but many similar personalities, both ‘good’ and ‘bad’, are there in history of our own country and the world. But only the good-bad persons are those who are welcomed everywhere, we call them shrewd and smart. And we find the other kind of persons very different from us, that we cannot accept them one among us. Famous fighter Bruce Lee’s words would conclude this well, “I don’t fear a person who has practiced 1000 different styles of kicks, but I fear a person who has practiced a single style of kick, 1000 times”

                Every one of us has/had this quality of pure goodness or pure badness within us. But we hide this within us, to show mixed qualities, because of personal and social commitments. Every one of us is enslaved to every other’s thought. We fear what society will think about us if we behave differently, if we wear out of ordinary cloth, if I have an ordinary mobile, and a lot more “what will they think, if I’s…” We wear attractive clothes, not to our comfort but to attract others. Many marriages happen because of the same social pressure and status war. We hesitate to help someone injured in accident for the same reason. That’s the same reason why we confine ourselves into boundaries, communities, religion and god. That’s the same reason why we earn money too. Money can never give happiness and content to person. But we still go in length to earn it, not for us, but to earn respect from society. After all, humans are social animals.

                The day we break our shackles of social commitments and pass through the stage where we stop caring what others think about our actions, that day we will be most happy and content even with money just enough to buy three square meals a day, without worrying about next day’s meal.

Beyond Infinity...

Just imagine the following two scenarios…You wake up one fine day morning, and go out for a walk. A robotic bee fiercely flying past you at a speed little more than the speed of light, chasing a drone flight whizzing at a speed twice the speed of light. You return home tiered, baffled by the science defying encounter, and open the fridge to cool yourself with some fresh juice. When the super cool juice is going down through your food track, mom comes complaining to you that the fridge is not working for last one week.

Seems like a scene from some James Cameroon movie? It may be, because, a little physics will help you out to judge that above mentioned events are highly impossible, as they defy two fundamental laws/assumptions of physics that, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light and you cannot obtain work from a machine/system without supplying external power (Thermodynamics second law in simple language). In this article I did like to ask a small question. “Are the above mentioned events really impossible? Why should the laws of physics be always true? What if these laws are proved to be wrong in the near future and whatever we read in our physics texts ceases to be true anymore?”

I wish to group fundamental law into two types. First one can be the type of law that’s framed by careful observation of nature’s ways, like sun rises in the east, or the Newton’s gravitational law.    The second kind of law is of our interest, which reflects the human inability. If we can’t define or explain, why something is happening some way, but not the other way round, we frame it as a law or call it as god or evil. Stephen Hawking’s words fit in here perfectly, “Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent god to lord over it over every aspect of human life”. Some centuries later, these words will fit in to our generation too. Here I will present two cases were laws of physics are defied by nature.

We all know plants and trees very well, as they are everywhere and are part of our daily life. I am obvious and hope you too are that plants and trees don’t have any motor pumps attached with them. And they are able to transfer water against gravity, from ground through roots to its vital parts, without any external power source. Physics relates this to concept of capillarity and many other phenomenon. If this is possible, why it is not possible to run a fridge or other systems without power?

     Another case which seems to defy Newton’s law of motion which can be simplified as, “A body remains in state of rest, unless and until it is acted upon by an external force”. At this place I would like to mention about “Sailing Stones”, which is found in Death Valley (Wish you had opened your Google tab). These stones seem to defy Newton’s laws because they slide from one place to another without any external force acting on them. Researchers are still presenting hypothesis, but the reason for this phenomenon is still unknown.

Nature has found its way around to obtain work without power, to move without force, and many other ways to defy laws of physics, still unknown to mankind. Mankind grouped these things under fundamental laws. But, as a famous saying goes, “Laws are meant to be broken”, and the day is not too far away. Who knows we may discover a particle or insects somewhere in the universe that may travel faster than light? And a day may come when physics books needs to be re-written.

P.S: Am neither a theist nor an atheist. Just a lover of Nature.