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.