Possibilities with physics

Science based on rational enquiry and meticulous experimentation has led to an amazing amount of understanding of the world around us. Physics, in particular, has unearthed subtle features of the world from atoms to galaxies. How insights gained from science, and in particular from physics, can be used to understand some of the bigger puzzles related to human thinking and challenges that the civilisation is currently facing, is the theme of this book. At the outset, I must say that the book is an interesting read and is accessible to a non-technical reader.

Newton’s laws allude to a deterministic world where we can make precise predictions about everything in the universe. However, it was realised that this is not true. First, at times billions of particles are involved in a process and their individual motion is not trackable; second, chaos theory tells us that the situations which start very close may lead to very different future possibilities, making the equations unable to predict anything; third, and the most striking, the quantum world is intrinsically non-deterministic.

Despite these difficulties, physicists understand these situations which are counterintuitive and at times involve explorations into domains where our common sense does not work. What can we learn from this success story of physics, and how can some of the key conceptual advancements be used to explain things outside the domain of physics?

Thermodynamics leading to the development of heat engines played a major role in the Industrial Revolution. The first law of thermodynamics is about conservation of energy and the second is about ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ energy. While most industrial processes consume ‘useful’ energy, they generate ‘useless’ energy, that affects the environment. Can one learn from the laws of thermodynamics and make them a part of our thinking in terms of developing economic policies?

The quantum world is a world of possibilities and a quantum particle can exist in more than one situation at the same time. This principle is behind the counterintuitive aspects of the quantum world, such as quantum entanglement, and leads to the possibility of building quantum computers. When we have not yet taken a decision, our mind is also simultaneously exploring more than one possibility. Can we learn from quantum physics and understand how our mind works? This is explored in a newly emerging field called quantum cognition.

In this spirit, the book explores several important aspects of understanding natural and social phenomena and the decision-making process of the brain, where principles of physics developed in very different contexts can be gainfully used. Each chapter explains an idea of physics in simple language and makes it accessible to a general reader. Then a connection of this idea to other fields of knowledge, life and policy-making is built, to show how it can be useful.

The books helps the reader think about physics as a way of life, rather than a set of tools that give us comforts of life. At times, the book is not able to do complete justice to the ideas of physics and also takes the connection too far. The connections and learning from physics should be considered more at the level of analogies and not a technical correspondence. The title is somewhat over-ambitious; to make sense of “some things” is a more apt description of the book, instead of claiming to make sense of “almost everything”.

— The writer is Professor of Physics at IISER, Mohali