One more for the road.

18:08



Well, in between sophomore year and a new project I'm working on, I completely forgot, that April 26th marked a full year of this blog. Man. A full year. I've written 34 posts, clocking over 20,000 words. I've learnt how to write better, and I've learnt so much. I now love physics far more than I ever have. I want to thank all my readers, both of you, for reading all these posts. I hope I got you thinking about this queer little world we live in, and taught you to be curious, and inquisitive, and preach a life of pure thought, in a cup of experimentation. Unfortunately, I won't be writing this often now, because I'll soon go down for boards, and be out till April 2017. But I'd like to give you one for the road.

I've been thinking about life. What lays ahead of me. Can I predict what the next few stages of my life? Well, when a toss of coin, I can be sure it'll be either heads or tails. Or will it? It could land on its side? Be sent to swiss banks as political black money before it lands. You never know. What about things with near perfect predictions of the consequence. When I press the spacebar, a blank character will show up on my screen. But what if the computer freezes, or melts down, or is intercepted remotely by the aliens. The coin, the spacebar, have one thing in common. They have a definitive set of outputs, that have near perfect chances of occurring. Why that blaring uncertainty?

Well, we have to look closely. Very closely. On an atomic scale. If you ever did middle school physics, you have probably heard of brownian motion, the law that states that particles move in a random unpredictable state. If you've done a masters in physics, or like, been on Tumblr, you probably have heard of Schrodinger's cat. The radioactive isotope has a 50-50 chance of decaying in the next hour? Well, Schrodinger taught as something else, aside the fact that if you throw a cat into anything, and everyone will care. You cannot know for sure, what a particle is going to do next. It may blow up. Go left. Go right. Both. Do the Champion dance, you can really never tell. Heisenberg sums this into one neat beautiful equation.



This is famously known as 'The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle'. Even if you know a particle's history, its velocity, mass, size, half-life, to Facebook stalking levels, you can still never be sure what it's going to do next.

Prepare For mind blow.

This is the random that makes everything happen. Imagine trillions of particles, with disjoint fates, doing random things, the possibilities are endless in the most literal way.

So, I can't ever really tell, what my future is going to be, no way. I can shift the probabilities though, influence them, bend them to my will, but never, ever, be certain where I'll go. Maybe to dinner with a schizophrenic walrus. Maybe across the heliopause on the voyager 1. Maybe I'll just watch another episode of Downton.

Well, maybe I'm not just talking on a physical level, because in a deep, intimate way, physics really derives from what we feel. It is our creation. The lens through which we see this world. With this blog, I hoped to change the way people looked at this world. This wild, infinitely untamable uncertainty is so threatening, and yet so liberating. My actions cannot certain anything.

This jungle we call the universe, is such a thrilling adventure. It shows the basic oneness of the human race. We sleep under the same sky. We are moving together, in one direction, to a common destination to the other side of the universe. We eat the same matter, breath the same elements. And we all happily on one lonely planet in a pathetic little corner of a vastly insignificant galaxy, but we don't care. The universe is not important to us, we don't need to know it. We make true meaning to ourselves, and once in awhile, look at the smiling stars, and ask the questions that change the world.

This may be the last time I ever say this, so I'm going to make it count. Goodbye for now internet, I'm Daksh Gupta, and as always, never, ever stop asking questions.


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